A World of Strangers (27 page)

‘It's William!' said Cecil, with an hysterical laugh of relief, as if the identification of the man as the familiar servant who cleaned the flats on her floor automatically put an end to the horror.

But as she spoke, the man got up, his back to us, and began to pace back and forth across the road, and in his splendid chest the hideous panting began again, working up to a gasping climax, and ended in the raucous and frightful sobbing that left him crouching in the gutter with his head bowed on his hands. ‘William!' Cecil called. ‘William!' -the voice of authority and reproof that never failed to bring him to the kitchen door. We saw his face, looking directly at us as he began to pace and pant again; saw that he did not see us, or anything.

‘William! William!'

Cecil was shaking as if she had just been struck in the face. ‘What's the matter with him?' she begged me. ‘What's wrong with him?' She felt the threat of a disaster she had never heard of, the dread of the discovery of some human sorrow unknown to her, hidden as the New Year, something that was neither death, poverty, or divorce.

She thought of sorrow, I thought of madness. It seemed to me he must have gone crazy. I wanted to go out and try to talk to him, but she would not let me go without her, she flung on her clothes grimly and made me wait for her.' You don't want to go. You watch through the window.' ‘No, no.' Her hands could hardly put her clothing together.

She stood beside me on the pavement, looking down at the man, her one trembling hand with the nails scarlet against her temple, holding back her hair. We called his name, but the man did not know we were there. We clattered up the ringing iron of the back stairs to the roof, where the servants lived, and fetched one of the other flat boys. He was a small, bow-legged Basuto, who smoked a pipe as
crooked as his legs. He stood looking at the man in the gutter, admiring his extremity. ‘He been smoking.
Dagga
make him like that.'

‘Speak to him, go on, speak to him,' ordered Cecil angrily; she might have been telling him to scrub the floor.

The little man didn't move. ‘I don't touch him,' he said. ‘He know nothing, nothing. Sometime three day he won't know nothing.' He enjoyed giving information.

‘Dagga!
But he's in agony!' Cecil covered her face, up to the eyes, with both hands.

It was true that the man in the gutter
knew nothing;
could not seem to find his way back to himself. His was an unspeakable anguish of alienation, lostness, the howling of the wolf of the soul in a waste. The ghastly ritual went on: tearing anxiety of pacing and panting, climax of sobs, then panting again.

Cecil took her hands from her face, and I saw that the palm of one was indented with the marks of her teeth.

She went into the flat and made some strong black coffee. When I approached him with a cup he flung himself away like a wild beast for whom food, in the hand of a man, is overlaid with the scent of fear.

Cecil never took her eyes off him; when he panted, her hand flew to her breast, when he sobbed, her mouth twitched. ‘Should we send for the police?'

‘They'll arrest him.'

‘Get a doctor?'

It did not seem possible that any human being could reach him, where he was.

‘Why did he do it?' she kept saying.

A few Africans had wandered down from the building, drawn by the spectacle. They talked and pointed, standing back, the way they might at a zoo. ‘That's his Christmas,' said a tall man with speckless black-and-white shoes, a Stetson, and a happy way of chewing a match. Christmas. The word was echoed in agreement, indulgently. When they had seen the whole thing through two or three times, they went back up the stairs, or strolled off up the street talking in their own language and detaining each other with the sort of
gestures described in the air that people use when they are capping each other's anecdotes.

We went inside, too, and in the living room, which did not face on the street, you could not hear the man. But Cecil kept going to stand in the bathroom, where you could. She sat on the edge of the bath and shushed me as if she must hear what there was to hear; the tap dripped and the steam parted to liquid runnels on the tiles while the frenzied travail sounded on, bestial and wretchedly human at the same time, a monstrous serenade from some medieval hell. It was all the cries we do not cry, all the howls we do not howl, all the bloody furies in our hearts that are never, must never be, let loose. Even I was afraid, hearing it; not of the man, but of a stir of recognition in myself. We sat in a kind of shameful fascination, and did not look at each other. She was tight-lipped, her long hands were clenched on themselves, the spikes of both blood-red thumbnails folded back on the fists.

The sobs died; whistled away like a wind in a broken, empty place. There was a roaring cry that brought tears to attention in Cecil's eyes, turned fiercely to me. Then the sound of a man running, running up the street, running away with the grit of the street powdering beneath his power. At the bathroom window, we saw him, past the leaning bicycle, past the stragglers, up the hill where the curve of the street lifted him behind the foreground of the Jacarandas.

It was a gentle evening, as it so often is after a grillingly hot day in Johannesburg. Scraps of pastel floated about the sky, between the buildings, the trees and the chimneys of the street. Cecil went into the kitchen to get some ice and there I found her, her head against the grey dish towels that hung on a nail.

‘Are you crying?'

‘No.'

‘What's wrong?'

She turned and she still had the look she had had when she couldn't stop listening to the
dagga-crazy
man. ‘I don't know what I'm going to do.'

‘How d'you mean? What about?'

‘This year.' She stood in the kitchen as if it were a ruin. But the cheap alarum ticked and the engine of the refrigerator broke into a run; it was as I had always remembered it.

‘What do you want to do?'

She said, ‘What have I got to show? Twenty-nine. Not enough money to live decently. What on earth can I do with myself? The whole – thing – frittered away.' She pushed the child's tricycle aside with her foot, and began to run the hot tap over the ice-container. The cubes tumbled into the sink, and above the clatter she said savagely,' Hamish's is a terrible place, your whole life could go there, like one of the lunch parties.'

She began to talk of what she would do if she had money, if she didn't have the child, if she lived in Europe. For the first time since I'd known her, I heard the South African accent come out in a phrase, in a word, beneath the carefully acquired upper-class English stereotype of her voice. I didn't have the heart to tell her that she would find the same parties, the same rich indulgent friends, the same thoroughbred horses, everywhere.

‘His Christmas!' she said, suddenly. She was sitting on the divan beside me and I felt a convulsion move her body, like the shudder a dog gives before it is sick. ‘What other country is there where you'd have a thing like that on your doorstep? What a Christmas for anybody! Nothing but a beast! How can you live with savages around you!'

I said to her, ‘But you cried. You made coffee for him.'

‘No,' she said. ‘No. They said it was his Christmas. What would make anyone choose that Christmas?' Like evidence, she began to gather up the presents, with their coloured and tinsel wrappings, their ribbons and sprigs of holly and extravagantly affectionate cards, that we had brought from Alexanders' and piled on the table when we came in.

Often, in the letters written to me from England, I would come across the phrase ‘the life out there': the people I knew read of strikes, of beer-hall riots, and arrests for treason, they saw pictures of smiling black babies dressed in beads, of tall buildings, of politicians whose defiantly open mouths might be prophesying doom or development. Out of all that, I suppose they rounded off some sort of sphere to contain me, vague to them but
of course
certain to be perfectly clear to me.

They would have understood a city of many different ways of life, all intermingled, but would they have understood the awful triumphant separateness of the place I was living in? Could I tell them how pleasant it was to be lulled and indulged at The High House? Could I explain the freedom I felt where I had no legal right to be, in that place of segregation, a location? I supposed that to have a ‘life out there', a real life in Johannesburg, you'd have to belong in one or the other, for keeps. You couldn't really reconcile one with the other, the way people were, the way the laws were, and make a whole. The only way to do that was to do what Anna Louw had done – make for the frontier between the two, that hard and lonely place as yet sparsely populated.

In any case, I had no particular wish to explain myself, or the irreconcilables of the way I was living, to anybody, even myself. All my life I had lived among people who found it necessary to explain. If they hadn't given me any tradition but doubt and self-examination, then I had chosen to prefer to trust to instinct. In Johannesburg, at least, it had proved a fairly lively way to live.

Steven's gusto renewed itself as naturally as the sun rose every morning. Living by his wits kept them skinning-sharp; his whole life was an endless outwitting of authority. Sometimes he was a child playing cops and robbers; sometimes he was a lawyer cunningly, constantly, watchful for
loopholes in a case that built up more formidably every day. He would slip into my office with his well-brushed suède shoes and his well-cut suit hanging fashionably loose, looking down his nose as he smiled, the way he had seen filmstars do.

‘Well, who've you been talking into something now?'

Suddenly he'd sit down opposite me, throwing aside the pose, grinning his battered, broken-toothed grin.

‘The trouble with you, Toby' – ‘the trouble with you' was one of Steven's favourite openings – ‘is that you've lost faith in the power of the human voice. You only believe things when you see them written down. It's much better not to have things on paper, for other people to keep after they've gone out of your head.'

‘No simple wisdom this morning please.'

‘Don't worry, man, I'm off. You remember that fellow from Tzaneen, Bobby, the short one?'

‘I don't, but that doesn't matter; what about him?'

‘He's a good guy. He's got a job with old Jake, in the printing shop, but he hasn't got a permit to work in Jo'burg. I'm gonna fix it for him now.'

He knew a fellow. This time a fellow who was a clerk in the immigration office. But always a fellow somewhere; a fellow who laid bets on horses for him; a fellow who bought brandy for him; a fellow who got him an exemption pass, so that he didn't have to carry a wallet-full of identity papers and tax receipts about with him. The more restrictions grew up around him and his kind – and there seemed to be fresh ones every month – the quicker he found a way round them. Much of his vitality and resource and time went into this; sometimes I wondered how long one could keep up this sort of thing – how would he live as he grew older? – but mostly I enjoyed the flair with which he did it. Nothing could keep Steven out. In the locations often there was the charged atmosphere, smouldering, smothered, and sour, like the porridge turning to beer in the pots, of a vast energy turned in upon itself. But he wriggled and cheated and broke through.

At least once a week he would drag me off on some fantastic jaunt, or suddenly bring me into the company of new
people, all apparently old friends of his. We went to Lucky Chaputra's splendid wedding, in February, and to a conference of witch-doctors – pompous, prosperous men in blue suits with well-rounded waistcoats. He arranged a special performance of Indian dancing for me, and didn't tell me about it until we were at the door of the house in Vrededorp where the girl I'd seen before was waiting for us; then he laughed and swaggered and made boastful light of the surprise. ‘You're really impressed with that baby, I think, Toby,' he murmured, looking at me sideways. He would have pimped for me, but he was never in the least dependent on me for anything; that first night in the shebeen when we were drunk together he had got the moment he wanted from me; he didn't want anything else, or less.

Often I thought how well he and Cecil would have got on together, if they could have known each other. Their flaring enthusiasms, their unchannelled energy, their obstinately passionate aimlessness – each would have matched, out-topped the other.

William cleaned the floor around Cecil's feet unnoticed; the New Year went on as unremarkably as William's return to working anonymity; he had disappeared for three days, the day the turn of the hill hid him, but once he was back everything was as before. Cecil was going to ride Hamish's prize mare in the big Show that is held in Johannesburg at Easter, and the muscles of her forearms were quite steely with the determination of her training. She went off to Kit Baxter at the Karroo farm for a week, and when I went to Hamish's for a swim, on the Saturday morning, I found that old John Hamilton had fetched the little boy Keith and coy Eveline, the nanny, from the flat, and was giving the child a swimming lesson. I felt guilty because I hadn't thought to do it; I might have taken the boy to the zoo, or something, while Cecil was away, but really, she did so little for him that there was nothing much to compensate him for in his mother's absence. He turned and frowned away from the glare of the water, and, in the moment, he was terribly like her. Suddenly I wished her back, very strongly; I was aware
not of her laughing, talking, active social presence, but of her silent, sentient self that was inarticulate – her hand, smelling of cigarette smoke, early in the morning, the exact displacement of her weight as she flopped into the car beside me.