A SONG IN THE MORNING (17 page)

- Tswana and Xhosa and Tsonga and Swazi and Zulu, all the others. Chuck power at these groupings and there would be anarchy. If the Zulu had power over the Xhosa, or the Swazi over the Tswana . . . the State President knew what he was at when he kept the brakes on, which was more than the morons knew who shouted in London about oppression.

Erik was at the bar, leaning back, naturally, overlooking the scum. He could never read Piet's face, had to wait to be told what were the major's instructions.

"Shake the creature a bit. Says he has to know who the creature took to meet Thiroko."

Erik looked down at Arkwright. All skin and bone and wind. Erik had played open side flanker for Transvaal B.

The scum would have no muscle and no balls. If they shook the scum he'd rattle.

Arkwright walked home.

He had drunk four pints of Worthington, it was social security day. He was feeling low, feeling used. He'd put his bloody best bloody foot forward for priggy Curwen, and priggy Curwen had gone off into the wind. No thanks, no call. No bloody decency from priggy Curwen. And Anthea was pregnant again. First vomiting that morning. He was thinking of priggy Curwen and of Anthea heaving in the john, and with the beer inside him it was hard thinking. He never looked behind.

They took him fifty yards from his door. One from the front, one from behind. He thought he was being mugged, which was a laugh, last bloody penny for the last bloody pint . . . Down an alley. No lights. He smelled day old aftershave and day old body lotion, and he knew he wasn't being mugged. A punch in the solar plexus to double him, an uppercut to straighten him. He went down.

For a moment he saw them. He knew they were South Africans. Knew they were Boer pigs. Something of the width of the shoulders, the breadth of the hips. The hands were coming down out of the blackness to pull him up. He saw the pale blur of the faces, grinning. They reckoned he was insufficiently shaken. He was never asked to say who was the young man that he had introduced to Thiroko. It was Piet's hand that groped for Duggie's beard, to pull him up, to hit him again. The fingers found the beard. Duggie bit him. Closed his jaw on the hand and bit and shook his head as a terrier will with a rat. Bit and chewed at the hand, and heard the Boer pig scream, and felt the fingers loose his beard, and clung on while his teeth were half wrenched from his head. Piet heaved backwards and blocked Erik's chance to get his boot into the scum's rib cage.

Duggie staggered and ran.

He ran towards the lights and safety of the main road. He thought only of flight. He heard the pounding feet behind him. He ran up the alley, across the pavement, and into the path of a 38 London Transport double decker bus.

At the end of the alley Erik gripped Piet's arm, stopped him from going forward. He held him back in the shadow.

Erik could see the white-shock face of the conductor of the bus as he knelt beside his front wheel. He could hear the screams of a woman who had bent to look under the bus.

"You should get some medication for that hand, the scum might have rabies," Erik said.

* • •

Because of the late departure, sitting in the lounge, he read the evening paper front to back. He read of the death of Douglas Arkwright. It was said that Douglas Arkwright, 27, married and one child, had been drinking, that he had walked under a bus. The story made the paper because the traffic jam that followed the fatal accident had held up a royal princess on her way to open an art exhibition in Hertfordshire.

When the flight was called, Jack dropped the newspaper into a rubbish bin and walked briskly towards the boarding gate and his aircraft.

9

Jeez sat on the end of his bed.

He had eaten his porridge breakfast and given back his bowl and kept his mug. He was allowed to keep his mug and use it for drinking water during the day. He had washed and shaved under supervision. He had swept out his cell, not that there was much to sweep away because he had swept the cell floor every morning for the thirteen months that he had been in Beverly Hills. After he had swept the floor he had scrubbed it with a stiff brush and the bar of rock solid green soap that was for the floor and for his body. Sweeping the floor and scrubbing it were the only workloads demanded of him. No other work was compulsory for the condemns.

There was no singing that morning.

He sat on his bed because it was the only place he could sit when the floor was damp. Later in the day he sometimes sat on the floor and leaned his back against the wall that faced the cell door, beside the lavatory pedestal, but only for variety. Most of the day he sat or lay on his bed. He read sporadically, books from the library. He had never been a big reader. At Spac he had learned to be without books. If he was not reading then there was nothing but the time for thinking to disturb the events of his day which were his meals and his exercise session.

The thinking was hell.

Difficult ever to stop thinking. Thinking when his eyes were open and when they were closed, and when he was washing, and when he was eating, and thinking through dreams when he was asleep.

He hadn't had much of an education, but there was no stupidity in him, not until he'd been hooked into driving the getaway out of Pritchard. Jeez knew the days were sliding. He knew the legal processes had been exhausted.

He knew his life rested on the State President's decision. He knew that the State President refused commutation of the death penalty to the cadres convicted of murder. He knew that in these days of unrest the State President would hardly waive the penalty just because Jeez was White . . . Here we go, alto-bloody-together we go . . . Jeez didn't have to have a university degree to know.

He wondered how much notice they would give him. He wondered whether it would be the governor who would tell him.

He wondered how he'd be.

Some thoughts took charge in the night, some in the day.

The overwhelming thought was the fear of fear. The fear of buckling knees, the fear of his bowels and his bladder emptying, the fear of screaming or crying.

His thoughts of the team were increasingly rare. When he had first come to Beverly Hills he had thought every day of the team he had been a part of. Then there had been the favourite thought, an indulgent memory. He had been flown back from Greece after the exchange,with two guards down the steps of one military aircraft, marched across eighty paces, head back, elbows stiff, outpaced the guards, some-body signing something, the rest lost in a blur, up the steps into the RAF transport, mugs of hot tea laced with something by Lennie and then what seemed like two days' sleep before he had been met at Northolt by Colonel Basil. He'd had his hand pumped and he'd been whisked into the big black car.

He'd expected that he would be booked straight into a medical examination. Hadn't reckoned with bloody good old Colonel Basil. Directly into London. Over the bridge, down the ramp to the underground car park. Up the lift.

Onto the 7th floor of Century. Into East European (Balkan).

All of the team there, all of them sliding up from their chairs, and then Henry clapping his hands over his head, getting Adrian going, and Lennie following. And all of them giving Jeez the big hand, and Adrian kissing him on both cheeks and then on the lips, and the back slapping so hard that they half blew him away. And Colonel Basil smirking by the door and saying in his Brigade of Guards whisper, "The team never forgets a man in the field. The team always gets its men back." One of the girls scurrying off for beakers, and the champagne corks rocketing into the ceiling, and Jeez grinning like a Cheshire cat. And much later the car to a private clinic . . . His favourite thought. The good thoughts had faded with the months. The thought of how the team would be working for him came only infrequently now, usually when he was dreaming, and when he woke and felt the cold dawn air then the thoughts of the team were bloody smashed. It wasn't that he doubted that the team was working for him, he doubted now that the team had the power to take him out from Pretoria Central.

He yearned for quiet outside his cell. But the C section corridor, and the small corridor through C section 2 were never quiet in the daylight hours. There were always the voices of the prison officers as they told stories, laughed, talked about the papers and the television. There was always the shout of a duty officer approaching a locked door, and the door clattering open, and the smack of it closing.

Those were the noises that were on top of the singing.

No singing that morning, and that meant no hammer of the trap being tested in the afternoon. Each time he heard the shout for the doors to be opened, and then the clatter, and then the smack, he stiffened, and the sweat sprang to his forehead and his armpits and his groin.

There would be a shout and a clatter and a smack when they came to tell Jeez that it was commutation, or when they came to tell Jeez which day it would be, which dawn for the short walk.

He often thought of the others.

He hadn't seen the others for thirteen months, not since the passing of the sentence and the drive in the meshed police wagon across Pretoria and up the hill to the gaol. He hadn't seen them since the apartheid of the reception area at Beverly Hills. They had gone right to B section, he had gone left to C section. That was "separate development" for you. Four for B section because they were Black, Jeez for C section because he was White. They'd been laughing that day thirteen months before, walking loosely, easily in their leg irons and hand-cuffs. He wondered how they'd be now, waiting to learn if they'd all go. A bastard, that, if one or two of them were reprieved, and the others were taken to the hanging room . . . Wouldn't be a bastard, they'd all five go, because it had been a policeman. He'd meet them again in the preparation room. There they'd be together, apartheid waived, "separate development"

non-operable . . .

There was a shout. There was the clatter of a door opening.

There was the smack of a door closing.

Still and upright on his bed, Jeez waited.

He knew all the distances that sound carried through the unseen parts of the gaol. He had heard the door that was the entrance to the C section corridor. There was a murmur of voices. Another door opening. The door into C section 2. The unchanging ritual. He wondered why they always shouted their approach to a locked door, why the door was invariably slammed behind them.

He felt the wetness on his skin. He saw the flash of a face at the grille.

He stood at attention. He stood every time a prison officer entered his cell. A key turned in the oiled lock.

Sergeant Oosthuizen, smiling benignly.

"Morning, Carew. You slept well, did you, man? Your room's a picture. Wish my lady kept our house like you keep your room. You're going to have your exercise early, straight after your lunch . . . "

Jeez closed his eyes. All the shouting, all the clattering of the doors, all the slamming, to tell him that he was to be exercised an hour earlier than was routine.

"Yes, Sergeant."

"There's a nice afternoon for you, you've a visit."

* • •

The Suzuki 50cc was his pride and joy. For insurance purposes it was a moped, but in Jan's mind it was a fully-powered scrambler/road machine. He passed only cyclists and joggers, he was forever being buffeted in the slipstream of overtaking lorries and cars, but the Suzuki was his freedom.

In term time he came each morning from his parents'

home in Rosebank down the long straight Oxford, onto Victoria and Empire, and then along Jan Smuts to the University of Witwatersrand.

He loved the moped, whatever its lack of speed, because the under-powered Suzuki provided him with the first real independence of his 21 year old life. His club foot, his right foot, was a deformity from birth. He had endured a childhood of splints and physiotherapy. He had had to be ferried in his mother's car to and from school, he had never played rugby or cricket. The wedge that was built into the raised heel of his leather ankle boot gave him a rolling limp and prevented him from walking any great distance. Before the moped he had been dependent on others. Along with the moped came a black leather two-piece riding suit. The combination of his stunted physique and his taste for biker's gear made Jan a student apart. In the huge university he was virtually friendless, and that bothered him not at all.

His friends were far divorced from the Wits campus. His own comrades. He had his own contact codes. He enjoyed a secret area of life that was undreamed of by his colleagues on the Social Sciences course. In this society, dominated by muscle power and sports skills where he could play no part, his Suzuki and his comrades gave him the purpose he craved.

His parents marvelled at the difference in their son's attitude since they had bought him the moped. They thought of him as a good serious boy, and one who showed no inclination towards the radicalism that they detested and that seemed so rife on the campus. At home, Jan gave no sign of interest in politics. They knew from their circle of friends who had kids at Wits that their Jan had no links with the students, mostly Jewish, who led the university demonstrations and protests, who were whipped by the police, savaged by the security staff dogs. Jan had described those activists to his parents as ridiculous middle class kids with a guilt complex. They knew Jan had left the campus early on the day that Dr Piet Koornhof, Minister of Cooperation and Development, had been pelted and heckled.

On another day he had walked away from the burning of the Republic's flag and the waving of that rag of the African National Congress. His parents thought the making of Jan had been his moped and his studies.

There was a White girl doing ten years in the women's prison at Pretoria Central. She had been active in radical politics before devoting herself to the collecting of information for the A.N.C. Impossible to make the switch from overt to covert work. Jan had always been covert. Anyone who knew him, his parents, his sister, his lecturers, the students he sat with in lectures, would have been thunder-struck to have discovered that Jan van Niekerk was a courier for the Umkonto we Sizwe.