Double Negative (5 page)

The presence of a great photographer (to quote my Uncle Douglas), the pressure of his calculating eye, created subject matter. Wherever you looked, you saw a photograph. Not just any photograph either: an Auerbach.

We went down Rockey Street. On Scotch Corner, Auerbach double-parked while Brookes took a photograph of a man in a kilt and platform shoes touting for custom through a megaphone. This black highlander was peering through sunglasses with lenses the size of saucers. Then Brookes wanted to see the water tower on the ridge. He said it was like a tripod in
War of the Worlds
, only the heat-ray was missing. The whole place was science fiction. ‘That's what people fail to understand about South Africa,' he said. ‘It's a time machine. It's the past's idea of the future.'

‘Or vice versa,' Auerbach
said.

We took Stewart's Drive down into Bez Valley. Auerbach territory, as I knew from the book. Brookes wanted to stretch his legs, and so we stopped on a corner with an Apollo café, a Farmácia and a BP garage, and the two of them got out. I stayed in the car, brooding over the discussion earlier, sulking, I suppose. All around, the houses turned their good sides to the street and held their breath.

When they came back, Brookes was carrying a paper bag. While Auerbach aimed the car deeper into the valley, he rummaged in the bag and took out a can of deodorant. ‘If it's good enough for Henry Cooper,' he said, putting on an accent I couldn't place. He unbuttoned his shirt and sprayed under his
arms.

Auerbach drove us into Kensington. I hardly knew the area, although I recognized the playing fields at Jeppe Boys, where I had once kept wicket for a school side. We wound through smaller streets to Langermann Kop. A track led to the top of the hill. Auerbach put the shift in low and we ground up the slope with the
middelmannetjie
scraping against the bottom of the car. He stopped in a rubble-strewn clearing and we all piled
out.

There was a path going up the koppie that only Auerbach could see, enfolded in veld grass and flowering cosmos. He plunged in and we followed. Brookes burrowed through the veld like a glossy black beetle with his jacket creaking and the camera bumping against his chest. The plume from a long haulm came off in his teeth and he spat comically. When we emerged into the open, Auerbach was atop a rain-streaked outcrop with his hands on his hips, grinning. The gloomy inwardness of the morning had lifted entirely. ‘You won't find a better view of the city,' he called out as we approached. ‘You can see clear to Heidelberg. That's Jan Smuts over there.'

Beneath us, along the spine of the Reef, the land lay open like a book. Auerbach pointed out townships and suburbs, hostels and factories, mine dumps and slimes dams. His pleasure in the exercise was infectious. Brookes took some noisy photographs and hopped about, laughing and steaming. He was redder than before. He looked as if he had just got out of a scalding shower and stepped straight into his clothes.

We followed our guide back through the grass. Brookes fetched the paper bag and opened a Fanta orange for each of us, and we sat on the rocks looking out over Bez Valley like a gang of schoolboys playing truant. William and Henry and Ginger. A drowsy calm descended. It was a relief after the movement and chatter of the past few hours. I felt that I was swaying slightly, the way you do after a long journey when the bubble in an internal spirit level keeps rocking even though your body has come to rest. I could almost have dozed
off.

The slopes below were dotted with black wattle and sisal. Beyond them the houses began, first the side streets that ran dead against the ridge and then the long avenues that streamed away to the east, dragging your eye through a wrack of rooftops and chimneys in the green foam of oaks and planes, all the way out to Kempton Park where the elephantine cooling towers of the Kelvin Power Station stood on the horizon.

Stunned by the sunlight, we slumped against the rock with our faces turned to the sky, while Auerbach spoke about the history of the valley and the people who had lived there as it passed from gentility to squalor and back again. You could still see some of the grand mansions on the opposite slope. Down in the dip, there were houses that went back to the beginnings of the city, that had survived the cycles of slum clearance and gentrification and renewed decline.

‘You think it would simplify things, looking down from up here,' he went on, ‘but it has the opposite effect on me. If I try to imagine the lives going on in all these houses, the domestic dramas, the family sagas, it seems impossibly complicated. How could you ever do justice to something so rich in detail? You couldn't do it in a novel, let alone a photograph.'

Brookes started as if something had bitten him. ‘You were talking earlier about how you choose your subjects, or rather how they choose you. How does that work from up here?'

‘It doesn't. There's no way of telling from here what's interesting.'

‘Oh, I thought your point was that everything looks interesting from up here.'

‘I said complicated, not interesting.'

‘I'll say interesting then. That's what I think. Everyone has a story to tell.'

‘But not everyone is a storyteller.'

‘Fair enough. Everyone has a story, full stop. Someone else might have to tell it. That's where you come
in.'

Brookes was fiddling a pen out of an inside pocket, as if he was thinking of writing this
down.

‘I'm not a storyteller,' Auerbach said. ‘Even so, some stories are better than others.'

‘Why?'

‘They reveal something new. Or maybe they just confirm something important
–
or unimportant! They put something well. I don't know.'

‘Now you're arguing my point. It's not the story at all, it's how you tell it. Even I know that and I'm just a bloody journalist.' He scrambled to his feet and teetered on the edge of a rock. A comet of pebbles was stuck to the back of the jacket where he'd been sitting on it. ‘I'll bet you could find something worth photographing in every single house down there. Jesus, I'd love to know what's going on behind those doors. Can you imagine! You're the man for it, Saul! Pick one at random and let's see what it turns up. Throw a dart at the
map.'

‘That's exactly what some of my colleagues are doing these days,' Auerbach said, ‘or it looks that way to me. Just point the camera out of the window and hope for the best.'

Brookes eased the strap of his own camera out of his collar and said, ‘Why don't we test my idea? Seriously. Let's pick a house from up here, where one looks very much like another, and then go down and see what you can make of
it.'

To my surprise, Auerbach jumped up rubbing his hands together, saying, ‘Action, Gerry, action!' and the two of them riffled through the valley. After some joking about church spires and water towers, Brookes settled on a red-roofed house on our side of Kitchener Avenue.

‘I'd better take a green one then,' Auerbach said, ‘it's only fair,' and pointed further down into the valley, holding the pose until Brookes had squinted along his arm and approved the choice.

‘And yours,
Nev?'

Caught unawares.

‘Come, come,' said Brookes, ‘you mustn't be too careful, that would defeat the object. Eeny, meeny
…'

In the game they had started, a miss was as good as a mile. ‘I'll take the house next door to yours,' I said to Auerbach, ‘the one with the orange tiles.' A glimpse of the roof was all you could see of it in the greenery.

‘That's the spirit,' said Brookes.

Auerbach noted a couple of landmarks near the places we'd chosen, counting off the avenues north of Kitchener and the streets east or west of a steeple or a factory yard. Then we climbed into the Rambler and headed back down the koppie.

There was a lighter mood in the car now that we were setting off on an adventure. On safari, with Auerbach to cut the spoor.

In the back seat, with the window down, I worried about my choice and wished I could change it. The neighbours. The next best thing. It was meant to surprise, but it was
dull.

We looked for the house with the red roof
–
‘Visitors first,' Auerbach had insisted. It did not take him long to find the place at the end of Emerald Street. He made a U-turn and drew up at the opposite
kerb.

Brookes's choice was a city house with country manners. A corrugated-iron roof in need of paint beetled over a long stoep. On a balustrade with pillars shaped like pawns stood a fern in a rusty watering can and a birdcage made of bamboo, a Victorian replica by the look of it. A gate hung open across a faded red
path.

‘It's a student house,' I
said.

‘Watch out for tigers. They're not keen on cutting the lawn.'

‘I was thinking of the curtains. Anti-Waste sells that cloth by the kilo. Every student place I know is full of it.' Linda had an entire wardrobe of dresses and pinafores cut from disfigured prints, factory rejects caused by a jammed roller or a spilt dye. When she sat on the sofa, you couldn't tell where she ended and the scatter cushions began.

‘Let's see if anyone's home.'

‘What will you say?' I asked.

‘I'll think of something.'

The front door was framed by leaded panels, the regular pattern of blue and yellow spoilt by lozenges of clear glass where broken panes had been mended. Auerbach rang the bell. No one came. While we waited, Brookes strolled to the end of the stoep.

‘What the hell!'

We all went around the corner.

At the side of the house, where a bougainvillea growing on to the roof made a sort of arbour, a dozen skulls were fixed to the wall. Animal skulls, pale as driftwood, bleached to sea-shades against the powder-blue plaster. The centrepiece was obviously the skull of a horse. There were others whose shapes suggested the flesh in which they had once been embedded: a dog, a rabbit, and more I could only guess at
–
rat, lamb, lizard, mole. The way they were arranged, with the horse in the middle and the lesser creatures above and below, each in its proper station, the beaked birds under the rafters, the head of the dog at a height that invited you to scratch its ear although its jaw was dropped to snap at your ankle, made them seem less like trophies than ghosts, passing through the wall that instant, hungry for meat and grass, for air and company, breaking back into the realm of the living. One of the skulls had small, pointed horns, darkly whorled, as shiny as enamel. Suspended in the eye socket of the horse was a pocket watch with its hands hanging down, defeated.

‘Is it an altar?' Brookes asked.

Auerbach snorted
no.

To my fingertips, the bones felt slily manufactured. There were hard plates, smooth as china, and porous edges like baked goods, bread or biscuit.

‘It's almost art,' Auerbach said, with his hands cupped to a windowpane and his voice fogging the glass.

I also looked into the room. The familiar mess of a student life: mattress, desk, bookshelves of bricks and boards, beanbag, coat hangers on a broomstick angled across a corner on the picture rails, clothes mainly on the floor. Here on the window sill, an overflowing ashtray and a candle, and something else, a bird perched on a branch, a mounted specimen like a display in a natural history museum. The creature in its natural habitat.

Brookes took a photograph of the skulls.

‘Time stood still,' Auerbach said, leaning close to the face of the watch.

A path led down the other side of the house, blocked at the end by a wooden door. Just as Auerbach and I rounded the corner, the door swung open and a woman looked out. Whether she had heard the bell ringing in the house and the sound of our voices or just happened to be on her way to the front, I cannot be sure, but she recoiled at the sight of us and jerked the door
shut.

Waving me back, like a game ranger concerned for the safety of his charge, Auerbach hastened towards the woman, greeting her in Afrikaans. She opened the door, a slight woman with an elfin face, and spoke to him through the gap. He pointed to the sky and then to Brookes, who had appeared at my side. She smiled uncertainly with downcast eyes and answered so softly her words did not carry to me. They spoke at length, with their heads inclined towards one another as if they were sharing a secret.

Then he waved us closer. ‘This is Veronica. She lives here at the back with her husband, who's gone to work.' And he told her our names. Brookes stuck out his hand, but she didn't seem to recognize the gesture.

We all went into the backyard. It was cramped, cluttered, and garish in the sunshine. Facing us was the long side of a garage and the front of an outbuilding that was no more than a shack. Like the fences on either side, the corrugated-iron walls of the buildings were the colour of old scabs, as if they'd been sluiced with blood a long time ago. A washing line strung between two poles held some baby clothes and nappies, two bed sheets and a pink pleated skirt. There were thick pads of moss between the flagstones underfoot and lichens on the concrete doorstep. From a bucket under a tap came the yellow smell of soiled nappies and sucking sweets.

Veronica stood aside. What had he told her? Perhaps she thought we were officials of some kind: Brookes could have passed for a municipal inspector, especially now that he had taken out his notebook. What would she make of me, though, with my long hair and ragged jeans? I must spoil the picture. Then again, it hardly mattered whether she grasped what we were up to. Who we
were
was clear. We were white men. We would do as we pleased.

She was wearing a light summer dress and silver sandals with a wine-glass heel. You could see the bones of her face beneath the skin, the shape of her skull under her doek. In the jagged cage of the yard, with the air full of iron filings and rust, she looked out of place. Did she really hang up the washing in high heels?