Khotso

In the late 1990s, a colleague - recently migrated with her family from South Africa - told me an anecdote which is reimagined as the opening episode in this story.

 

The narrator (Stuart), a reluctant South African emigre to England, needs some reconciliation with his past and present - for the sake of his future . . .

 

 

I can’t take my eyes off the woman at the front of the queue. She has short black hair, looks about forty; she’s bolt upright and neatly cut, shaped suit with knee-length skirt. The main thing is her colour. She has the deepest tan I’ve seen since I came to England: a white woman in an almost black skin. Miss Tan, I name her. She has taken out all the shopping from her trolley. Deftly, the girl at the checkout passes each item above the scanner till it bleeps, then shoves it down the tray to join the growing collection by the carrier bag dispenser. Miss Tan looks around mystified . . . Now she seems to be glaring at someone. She goes to this black boy of 11 or 12 and says something to him. He looks at her blankly, but follows her back to the checkout where the girl is waiting, stone-faced, for money. And slowly, uncertainly, he unpeels a plastic bag and begins filling it. Miss Tan says a few words as she hands over her card. Her voice hits me at once as discordantly foreign, before I recognise the accent and remember it is mine also. The boy looks up: I follow his eyes to a black woman with straight lacquered hair, long leather coat and four bags of her own, approaching the scene open-mouthed.

 

“She said I had to pack her bags,” the boy tells his mother. She turns abruptly to Miss Tan, who appears to have lost some of her composure.

 

“Did you tell him to pack your bags? Why did you tell him to pack your bags?”

 

My compatriot’s tan has taken on a reddish tinge. “Look, I’m sorry . . . I didn’t think, er . . . children standing round, keep them busy . . . ”

 

“There’s loads of kids here. Why'd you pick on him?”

 

“I’m sorry . . . ”

 

“Where's your accent?”

 

Miss Tan gathers up all her shopping and tears out. The red in her cheeks has not abated. “Stupid cow!” the boy’s mother exclaims in summary. I want to follow my compatriot and say something to her. But I hold back. Minutes later, I’m cursing my hesitation.

 

* * *

 

It’s the summer of ’95, and I’ve been in England nearly three months. I live in the midlands, in a frayed, discordant place of brick and concrete. My small Rand fortune bought many fewer pounds than I expected. And just stepped off the plane, of course I had no credit. So I found myself renting an ugly terraced house, in a street too near the station for a quiet night. I spend half-light days in the main library, filling out job applications, occasionally going for interviews. Weekends I venture into the nearby countryside, bleak agro-industrial lands but with a hint of the spaciousness I’m used to. I go some days not speaking a word in conversation, nor being spoken to. It seems inconceivable this is the city my parents grew up in – the city I would have called home if they hadn’t emigrated to South Africa in 1963.

 

The place I do call home is Bryanston, a suburb of Johannesburg. I had a contented middle-class childhood there. To imagine that I was once a child requires of me more faith than memory these days – though perhaps no more faith than it takes to imagine I am an adult now. Still, my body can recall a gallery of sensations from my early years: the branding-iron heat of summer on my back, the tickling of flies, the whirling soft hiss of the sprinkler on the lawn. Or how I felt after a fight with Tim, my older brother.

 

Dad was a surveyor in a building firm through which he rose till it completely dominated his life. Mum was “a full-time mother and house manager, with overtime,” to use her phrase. Their time may have been scarce, but there was always plenty of money, much of it spent on extensions and improvements to the house and garden. I remember how excited I was when Dad sunk a borehole and installed a pool in the garden. Messing about in the pool was obligatory during the summer for us kids, especially during the regular braai my parents held. In all those years, I only saw Dad in it once, and Mum never. But they replenished the water constantly, and you’d often find them beside it, Mum sprawling on a lounger, Dad in his deck chair examining building plans and lists of specifications.

 

I was shy and didn’t make friends easily. But thanks to this kid called Roy Tournet, who made himself my pal early on, I have a few childhood anecdotes. I remember Roy once took to catching frogs on the way to school, and leaving them in girls’ desks. It was my own flash of inspiration to leave a frog in our teacher’s desk. We got a whipping for that. When we were older, it was Roy who inaugurated the first real talk about girls I had. About Annabel Richter to be precise. Years later, he married her, lucky bastard. Me, I have always taken life so seriously that all my romances were doomed. Anyway, we’re still the best of friends: I haven’t spoken or written to Roy and Annabel in the months since they drove me to the airport and hugged me goodbye at customs. But hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of them.

 

Tim and me fell out so often I can’t remember the details of a single argument we had. It’s left my heart coated with bile though. The three years between us felt like three hundred, and he for one seemed perfectly content with that. When we fought, he would win and I would cry. Mum and Dad thought I was being a nuisance. Beth was different. She would take me to the kitchen, dry my eyes, and hug me better. She would play games when I wanted, or cook me a special treat, and sing quietly to me words I did not understand.

 

Beth, a small Sotho woman, was our maid. My parents counted themselves liberals, and refused to take a maid at first. Mum looked after Tim all on her own, till I came along. It was too much, she said, she needed help. That’s when she hired Beth. When I was very young, I thought I had two mothers, and Beth was my favourite. I must’ve been five or six when Mum told me I was old enough to eat in the dining room with them. I knew Tim had once eaten in the kitchen with Beth and me, so I sensed there would come a day when I was summoned. But I wasn’t ready for it when it came: “I want to stay with Beth!” I wailed. Mum was all for giving in. It was Beth who silenced me: “You’re grown up now,” she said. “Now make me happy and do what your Mum wants.” I went to the dining room, sticky with tears and anguished to find growing-up could take away as easily as it gave. After that, I would steal into Beth’s room occasionally, or scour her cupboard in the kitchen. I would help myself to as much of her fruit and vegetables as I could before I had to scarper, taking from her the food she used to share with me. Of course, she knew what I was up to: I always left clues – my watch, or a comic perhaps, abandoned at the scene of the crime. If Mum had found out, she would have been furious.

 

Beth’s husband, Gabriel, worked in many of the gardens of the neighbourhood, including ours. He was a generous giant, and the local kids, including me, took care to abuse his generosity. On Fridays, his pay-day, we would swarm round him on his way to the shops, where he would always buy sweets for his entourage. I was about nine when their youngest son, Stephen, was born. I was excited to see a baby in the house. Actually, he lived with Beth’s mother, but he came to our house sometimes. I remember the day I tickled and tickled him till we both squealed with laughter. “Why can’t Stephen live here with us and Beth?” I asked Mum. “He has to live with his Grandma,” she replied. “Why?” I persisted. “It’s the law,” she answered. I didn’t know what she meant, but the way she said it, it sounded scary.

 

* * *

 

I’m standing at the gate to the King’s School. Dad won a scholarship here, which was a big deal then, as it was the oldest and most prestigious school in the city, apparently. This is the first time I’ve visited it, and I’m astonished to find it is a crumbling stone building in a cramped and dirty backstreet. I imagined it to be a lot grander. Well, it certainly looks “historic.” There’s a little statue of Henry VIII in a niche above the gate. The buildings in the courtyard beyond are soot-coloured, but a bit less weathered: one is dated 1896. (The words ‘Jameson Raid’ come to me.) It’s the middle of the summer holidays, and the doors are locked.

 

“Can I help you?” comes a voice.

 

“No, just visiting,” I say. But I know that won’t satisfy the man in blue overalls who has just appeared through the gate behind me. “My Dad was a pupil here. He talked about it a lot. I thought I’d just come and see it for myself.”

 

“That’s natural enough . . . from your accent, it doesn’t sound like he stayed local!”

 

“Yeah! . . . ”

 

“ . . . Australian are you?”

 

“South African.”

 

“South Africa, eh? You’ve been through a few changes recently, haven’t you?”

 

“We certainly have.” I sense the man wants to ask me something, and I have a pretty good idea what it is.

 

“So what do you think of your new President then?”

 

“Mr Mandela? . . . I think there’s a lot of respect for him in South Africa, after what he’s been through. I don’t think anyone underestimates the difficult job he’s got to do now.”

 

“Must be strange, though. Having a black president, after all that apartheid jazz.”

 

“It’s a new beginning . . . beginnings are always difficult . . . ”

 

“So are you here on holiday?”

 

This is the first time I have been asked this question. I had no idea how hard it would be. “Yes,” I lied.

 

The man introduces himself as Bob and says he’s the school caretaker. He takes me on a quick tour of the refectory and the hall and the chapel, which, he assures me, have hardly changed since my father’s day. He leaves me in the chapel alone for a few moments, while he does some repairs. When he gets back, he asks me: “So, do you feel like you’ve come home then?”

 

“It’s pretty moving,” I lie again. I feel nothing here.

 

* * *

 

Because our parents kept their British passports, Tim and me were not eligible for National Service. I had mixed feelings about that. Don’t get me wrong: I had no illusions about what National Service could mean. A name from school got sent to Angola, and was killed. Roy was badly shaken up after falling into a pit of broken glass while he was patrolling one of the townships. Still, I was a bit uncomfortable about not being claimed for itself by the country I thought I belonged to.

 

At university in Durban, I studied Geography. So while most of my peers were experiencing their country through National Service, I was seeing it laid out on maps. I spent many hours in the library, and scrutinised all the maps of South Africa. Not just roads, rivers and cities, but vegetation, relief, geology, climate, minerals, agriculture, tribal areas, group areas, homelands. (I know every inch of that country. Show me any part of any map of SA today, at random, and from memory I can tell you what’s to the north of it, to the south, east and west.) The name of every place and feature conjured an image. I hadn’t actually travelled round the country much, but I had all these pictures in my head, pictures from TV, books and magazines, of sand ridges and salt pans, veldt and karoo, of painted flesh and neck-rings, of baobab, cycad and kokerboom. The most vivid images were of the mountains: huge pillars and sawtooth chains of rock as dissolute and enraged as the sun beating down on them. Calling those sights to my mind’s eye now still satisfies vicariously my few nihilistic urges.

 

I was very happy in those days, poring over maps of my country. I bought a tourist map of SA last week. It doesn’t show the detail that I used to fix on, but repeating some of those beautiful, familiar words as I follow the blue lines across the paper . . . Molopo, Umzimkulu, Ngwempisi, Breede, Crocodile . . . I drift out of my time and place, and into silence.

 

* * *

 

There are three different reactions I provoke as a white South African in England. The first is indifference – which is not technically a reaction, I admit. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing either. The second is sympathy, or is it empathy? A decent, law-abiding white man driven from his home by an insidious black conspiracy - with the final twist being that they’re taking over in England too! “You’ve jumped from the frying pan and landed in the fire!” to quote my nextdoor neighbour. She’s always bringing me leftover food and cake, offering to do my washing: she’ll do anything to make me feel at home. Third is a sort of patronising smugness: to those people, I am a curiosity, or worse: a child of apartheid, a hater of democracy, a white supremacist unable to live under black rule. Antonia falls within the more charitable wing of this group: she’s a librarian, and the only friend (and a very casual one at that) I’ve made since I moved here. She’s a devotee of William Blake – I went to her presentation at the library last week: “Blake: The Inventor of Art Nouveau?” Curiously, she’s also a devout Anglican, careful to detest the sin but never the sinner: I imagine she looks forward to my eventual rehabilitation in England’s cool and multicultural society.

 

I’ve just been for a job interview. The post is a minor one in the personnel department of the city hospital. I’m overqualified for it, and certainly wouldn’t have taken it in SA. But I’ve spent three months here being choosy and got nowhere. So anyway, I’m called into the interview room, and I notice immediately that one of the interview panel is black. At first, it is another man, the panel chair, who does all the talking. He asks me about the kind of work I did in SA, then about my move to England: I feed him my stock line about “richer career development possibilities,” which probably sounds a bit hollow in the circumstances. Then the black man weighs in with a marked Caribbean accent: “As a team leader, you’d be managing people of different ages and different backgrounds. Is that something you’ve done before, and how well do you think it went?”

 

Feeling hot and steamed up, I stammered through a reply. I threw out a couple of the right words, like ‘diversity’ and ‘sensitivity,’ but the rest was mumbled filler. I could feel their eyes on me, heavy, voyeuristic. Like they were watching for a trace of pain or revulsion, or just a flicker of irony. I gave them all that and more. Finally, I was asked if I had any questions: I proffered a minor query for the sake of the occasion, and while the chair plodded on with a detailed answer, I weighed up in my mind the prospects for making a full confession there and then.

 

* * *

 

South Africa: it was beautiful, it was home. It was also a pariah. Why can’t we hold our heads up high like everyone else? I quizzed myself indignantly. At university, I attached myself to the anti-apartheid movement. I strode about the fringes of the UDF during its campaign for a mass boycott of the ’87 election. I signed my name, carried my placards, and tried to have as many black friends as possible. Actually, I had only one: Charles. We took a couple of classes together. It wasn’t a great friendship to tell the truth. All we talked about was our class and our assignments. I tried to broach bigger, political, stuff, but either caught myself lecturing him, or else simply lost my conviction after a few words and tailed off self-consciously. It didn’t help that Charles was even more introverted than I was, and a Zionist. Strangely, it was through him that I met Joel Lindeman, an extrovert Communist. He was studying Law and, like me, from Jo’burg. He was everything I wanted to be and wasn’t. Proverbially tall, dark and handsome, he went through three very beautiful girlfriends in the time I knew him. People shut up and listened when he spoke. He could baffle opponents with ideas pulled out of nowhere, and fire crowds with a speech improvised on the spot. I’m astonished he tolerated someone like me in his company.

 

The Christmas of ’88, I went with Joel to one of the townships. He had volunteered his legal skills to a trade union there. I was twenty-one, and though I’d lived in a country 90% black all my life, I’d never been in a white minority anywhere. Despite myself, I felt something like I imagine drowning to feel. I was repelled by the shacks, the raucous shouting, the hideous scavenging dogs – and most of all by the eyes drilling into me. The roads were trash-strewn, narrow and potholed, so we drove slowly enough for me and the locals to have a very good look at each other. But I couldn’t meet a single face - and kept my own hard as marble. We were there under an hour; it felt like a day.

 

On the way back, near the edge of the township, I noticed a bunch of teenage boys, four or five of them, crouched on the ground. They had someone pinned down: it was an older woman. I heard her yell as we drove by. One of the boys was pouring white powder into her mouth.

 

“What are they doing?”

 

“There’s a boycott of white stores,” Joel replied casually. “She must’ve broken it.”

 

“Shouldn’t we do something?”

 

Joel didn’t answer, which was unusual for him. I was in a sullen mood the rest of that day. In the evening, Joel, with his current girlfriend and two of their friends, made his only visit to my Bryanston home. We were sat round the pool drinking. As I went off to discharge some of my spent beers, I met Beth coming outside. A short while later I returned: as I approached the glass doors that led to the garden, I heard Joel and Beth talking. I stopped to hear Beth’s voice: “Everything I have, all my thoughts and all my time and money, is for my children.”

 

“Of course,” said Joel, “your children are your future. They’re the future of everyone in South Africa. But that’s why SADWU is so important. It and all the other unions are there to build a better future for the children of this country to live in. A better future for your children.”

 

I swept back into the garden. Beth and Joel fell silent and the others began studying the stars. I’ll not forget what it felt like to be a host greeted with awkward silence by his guests. Beth went off to do whatever she was doing. And words passed between Joel and me. He won: “Why would you be so bothered if your maid joined a trade union? Why would you not want her to think about SADWU or to hear about it?” His companions sniggered. Joel and me have lost touch now, so I have no idea what he thought when the Berlin Wall came down.

 

* * *

 

It’s incredible: I’ve got the job at the hospital! The interviewers must have taken pity on me. Today is my first day. My manager turns out to be the black man on the panel, Bill Williams by name. He’s introduced me to my team (both of them), and left me at my desk to read some stuff and generally get myself sorted. There’s a sharp ‘ping’ on the window. Three teenage boys in the car park below are aiming gravel chips at the building. Pat calls hospital security on the phone, but already the boys have disappeared.

 

At lunchtime, Bill invites me to eat with him at a nearby pub “so we can get to know each other a bit better.” On the way, he gives me his life story. He came to England from Trinidad in the early sixties to work in a car plant, but the factory closed down in 1981. “I said to myself, I have two choices. I can wait around for the same job and the same money. Or I can study, get a degree, have the chance of a better job at the end. It wasn’t an easy decision. I had three children. My wife is a nurse, her wages weren’t really enough. For six years I stacked supermarket shelves just to make a bit extra, and studied whenever I could. But I made the right choice.”

 

I nod. I make approving noises. And I think, why is he telling me all this?

 

“You know what I regret? That I waited twenty years to make that choice. But when I came to this country, people from the West Indies, we were here to work and make some money, not to study for degrees or have a career. There was a lot of prejudice in those days. And I believed every word of it.”

 

I am silent. It is a hard silence. I know he must feel it.

 

“What I’m saying is, when we go to another country, we imagine all the things people think of us, and let it get in our way. It’s the same whoever we are, whatever . . . I hope I’m not patronising you.”

 

I stifle a laugh. “No, I don’t feel patronised at all.” In fact, it’s rather touching.

 

After a pause, Bill tells me he meets many South Africans nowadays. “A few years ago, it was a very rare thing to see you. Today, I’m meeting so many. We have several nurses from South Africa, and two doctors. You’ll meet them soon enough – I’m sure you’ll have a lot to talk about.”

 

* * *

 

I returned home after graduation to find Beth had gone. Apparently, Gabriel had been very ill and needed her to care for him full-time – for how long, nobody knew. The story told by the neighbours on whose property it had occurred was that he’d been mixing weedkiller, and had left some of it in an old mug which he’d promptly forgotten about, then drunk from later. “He had a big heart,” they said affectionately, “but he always was a bit simple.” According to Dad, Gabriel himself reported that some new spray equipment wasn’t working properly and had squirted chemicals into his face. Whatever the truth about the causes of his illness, one of the consequences was that my parents and two neighbours bought him and Beth a house to recuperate in what they were told was the nicest part of Soweto. The two neighbours each took on one of the couple’s eldest daughters as domestics, to replace their parents’ lost income, while Mum declared that now her sons were grown-up, she didn’t need a maid any more. And that was that.

 

I don’t know what Beth thought about all this. My parents said she “saw the sense” in their proposals. As for me, I was furious. I demanded – it seemed ridiculous even then - that I should have been consulted. “Can you at least give me her address!” I thundered indignantly. But I did not write to Beth, or visit her.

 

Of course, Mum badly missed Beth, not just because she had become dependent on a maid, but because she had come to see her as “part of the family.” When a teenage girl called at the house asking for work one day, Mum took her on – the first in a stream of “bolshy” or “careless” staff that were to plague her from then on. Meanwhile, I had moved into an apartment block set in plush grounds, nearer downtown, and started work in the research division of a mining company. The momentous national events of the new decade played across my TV screen continually: I was a hard-core news junkie in those days. I didn’t actually do much, except vote in a referendum to end apartheid (as did every white person I knew). Then on April 27 1994, all of us, every race and tribe, voted. It was the first time we’d ever done anything together. I held my head high that day. And when Mandela was sworn in, I felt ten kilogrammes lighter . . .

 

On the eve of each of these events, I dreamed they would draw a line under history. Yet each led only to frequent pangs of disillusion. A good day was one in which I didn’t learn about suburbanites being pulled out of their cars by robbers and shot dead after some misunderstanding, or maids being thrown into a bath of scalding water while their employers’ houses were ransacked. I stopped reading newspapers and watching TV after a while. But by then crime was a conversation staple among my friends and colleagues, especially when some of them became victims. Annabel was a nervous wreck after their home was burgled while they were all asleep, the robbers breaking in through the kids’ bedroom. She and Roy hope to emigrate, but they still haven’t got a visa. In the meantime they’re surrounded by guns, razor wire and Armed Response.

 

Tim was attacked one night too. He was waiting at a red light when he was ordered out of his beloved Porsche by three armed black teenagers. He was kicked and beaten, and stripped of his wallet and watch while they pressed a gun to his temple. His attackers made off in his car, which has never been traced. Three months later he’d left for London. For the sake of the children he and Sue wanted to have.

 

What happened to Tim, and then his leaving the country, shook Mum and Dad up a bit. I heard them arguing about it at a friend’s braai. Dad said Tim should have stayed: “This is a young country where you can make a difference. That’s why we came here thirty-odd years ago and it’s still a land of opportunity. I mean, people like me and Brian and Ted there, we’ve worked hard, given our lives to build up South Africa to give our kids a good standard of living.”

 

“And I’ve given my life to bringing up our kids”, said Mum. “And right now I’m sleeping easier knowing Tim and Sue are out of the country.”

 

“Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s bad, very bad, but it’s nothing new, is it? We’ve had crime problems as long as I can remember.”

 

“It was different then. That was under apartheid. There was almost a reason for it, you could understand it then. Now it’s so ingrained you really do wonder where it’ll end.”

 

“But there’s crime everywhere nowadays. People don’t respect each other like they did, and if they see something and want it, it’s theirs. I’ll tell you this, though: in thirty-odd years, we’ve had less aggro here than Bill and Nancy have, back in England.”

 

It’s true Dad’s cousin had had a spate of burglaries a year or so before. Still, I understood his laid-back attitude to the escalating robbery and murder statistics. The thing was, we’d never been victims. Neighbours were mugged and burgled, but not us. And my guess is that Dad, in his heart if not in his head, saw in this random good fortune a verdict on himself. For years he had been telling us he was scrupulously fair in his treatment of all his subordinates at work, whatever their colour. And in the eighties he had taken it upon himself to set up a kind of mentoring scheme within the firm for the intensive training of selected black workers. The walls of his study gave an insight into Dad’s world: plaques, testimonials, photographs revealing a tricky structural problem in a bridge or the moment a crane lifted the last vital piece of equipment into a new power station. Pictures of colleagues throughout southern Africa; Dad with some of his black trainees; Dad shaking hands with the local ANC functionary; a group photo taken with Nelson Mandela at a ‘business leaders’ luncheon. And every face on those walls wore a smile.

 

As for me, I would stay with my country, whatever happened. Because one day we would be the envy of the world. One day, Nguni and Khoisan, Xhosa and Zulu, Afrikaans and English, Jews, Indians and Malays, we’d eat in the same restaurants, work in the same offices, dance in the same clubs. We’d be together at weddings and birthdays, we’d talk to each other about our families, moan about our bosses, show each other our holidays photos. Our kids would trade computer games and pirate videos. One day, the smug world that had despised us would have to eat its words. I wanted to be part of that. There’d be mountains of distrust to climb through on the way. But each day was a step closer . . . I find the cliché wretched and indigestible now, and I know I’ll never let go of it.

 

* * *

 

I fancied a trip to London, and thought it decent to let Tim know I would be in town. Sue answered the phone: she assured me that Tim (who was out) would love me to visit, and proposed a meal at their place this evening. So here I am, waiting quietly to leave. Tim invited a colleague, Peter, who brought a woman called Myra. Tim and Peter are accountants, and, by a stroke of good fortune, Sue and Myra are both teachers. Most of the conversation has been about work. But via a lengthy consideration of attitudes toward South African qualifications in England, we are now talking about South Africa. Tim’s decided to clear the table and do the washing up. I’d join him, but the only things we have in common I’d rather forget.

 

Sue is telling Peter and Myra what she misses most. She’s mentioned the heat, the fresh air, the space. She’s talked about her friends and colleagues, her family home in Pietermaritzburg, and now she’s talking about monkeys: “When the house was quiet, they would come into the garden, looking for food. Lychees, mangoes, paw-paws, that type of thing. They made a real mess – leaves and branches everywhere. If they got into the house, you’d have to spend a day cleaning up after them. So we always had to check the windows before we went out.”

 

“Aah, they sound really cute,” coos Myra.

 

“We watched some of them grow up: one year they were babies, clinging to their mother; the next year they had their own little ones.”

 

“It must be wonderful to be so close to nature.”

 

“You wouldn’t want to get too close, you might get bitten. And they carry AIDS.”

 

“ . . . What about you, Stuart,” asks Myra, “what do you miss?”

 

“Everything,” I respond acidly. “Nothing really touches me here . . . England is so old, there are so many people. I can’t imagine how I could make a difference . . . I just don’t feel like I belong.”

 

“But you don’t belong in South Africa either,” says Tim, who has returned from his kitchen duties. “The Afrikaans are the only white Africans. They’ve been there three hundred years, they’ve made their own language. They’ve been poor, and they’ve fought for the land. Not to make a profit from, but to live on. Do you know what they call us?" he continues, addressing himself to Peter and Myra. "Soutpiel. Do you know what that means? Salt-penis. That’s what you get when you’ve got one foot in Africa and the other in Europe. That’s what you are when you don’t belong.”

 

Myra is amused by the Afrikaans lesson. I am not: “Isn’t it for me to decide where I belong?”

 

“What Stuart needs is a good woman,” Tim announces to his friends. “I’ve told him before. With a good woman beside you, you can ‘belong’ anywhere.”

 

“Do you know what I think?” Peter puts in, anxiously. “You only know where you belong when you’re somewhere else. When I was in New York last year, I knew what I was. I was English, British. Never had to think about it. Over here, I don’t even know what those words mean any more. I just think that’s the way the world is going . . . ”

 

“Here!” Tim hands me a newspaper - the South Africa Times UK. “You get these free, down in the West End. You can find out where all the South Africans go, pretend you’re back there with your boets. Course, it helps if you live in London, not out in the Styx.”

 

* * *

 

It was at Mum and Dad’s funeral that I told Tim I would be joining him in England. The decision made itself without my consent, but I accepted it once it came . . .

 

Maybe that’s what happens when everyone around you talks about crime and emigration. The two become inextricably linked, the second the self-evident answer to the first. You keep hearing about a ‘brain drain,’ and it troubles you that your country may be losing out; but then something happens and you’re glad to find you have a weapon to avenge yourself with.

 

As for Mum and Dad, well, the facts are these. They were waiting at a red light, and before it changed they sped off across an intersection. It was early evening, still light. An eyewitness described four, maybe five, black teenagers on the road beside Dad’s Volvo when it launched into its final journey. One was seen tapping insistently on the drivers-side window. Mum died instantly. Dad made it to a hospital, but without hope. He lingered for almost another day, barely conscious, as I stared at his wretched bloodied face, his dribbling, wheezing mouth. My head burned with fury and despair. In the final hours, I held his hand for the first time since I was a child.

 

I was in a daze. I didn’t know how to grieve. I verbalised ritual words of loss and pain and coping, as photos in Dad’s study and names from Mum’s anecdotes assumed human form to attend their funeral. Their ashes were sprinkled on the lawn for which they had cared so much. The inquest had not sufficient information to reach a verdict. But the local press speculated about the “madness of a fear which leaves no one alone.” It was a “sign of our times in the New South Africa.”

 

. . . I understand the other motorist - one Sipho Msane, father of three, “technician” - survived. But not uninjured. “He’ll never work again,” his doctor was reported as saying.

 

* * *

 

Tuesday, lunchtime. I’m crossing the park between the city hospital and the shopping area. Ahead, I recognise Miss Tan, sitting on a bench alone with a notepad on her lap. She’s munching her sandwiches dutifully, staring into space.

 

“Hi!”

 

“Hi,” she answers mechanically.

 

“Sorry to bother you while you’re eating, but I’m new in town. Is this the way to the shopping mall?”

 

My accent has the desired effect; Miss Tan’s eyes light up. I learn that she and her husband have been in England six weeks, that he is a dentist, and that her real name is Eva. I give her an account of myself, and write my address and telephone number on the back of one of the business cards I have been issued with.

 

“Thanks," she says, slipping it into her handbag. "You should definitely come round for a braai.”

 

“I’d be honoured, thank you. By the way, what’s the notepad for?”

 

“I’ve started keeping a diary. I think it helps to write things down. You know, how everything looks here, why we came, did we do the right thing, people we’ve left behind, places we might not see again. And cultural differences too: you say something and no one knows what you mean, or you do something and it gets you into trouble.” She tells me about her gaffe in the supermarket - unaware that I witnessed it. She doesn’t exaggerate, and she doesn’t leave anything out. “There were always boys to pack your shopping bags in Cape Town– I’m not saying that’s how it should be, but that’s how it was . . . I feel such a bigot.”

 

Now it’s my turn. “After I lost my Mum and Dad, I went to Soweto. To find the maid we had while I was growing up. Normally, I’d keep clear of places like that, but I just didn’t care. I even wound down my window twice to ask for directions. I found her house eventually. Mum and Dad had helped to buy it, but it looked like a cheap shack. There was rubbish outside and everything. The Beth I knew was a perfectionist. This would be like hell to her. Anyway, I knocked on the door . . . ”

 

* * *

 

A young man opened the door. Or was it a teenager? His face was rough and blotchy, and he wore black shades and a baseball cap. There was some commotion in the house: a girl was shouting, a couple of children were wailing.

 

“Stephen?”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Hi! It’s Stuart! Remember me? You were only a kid. Wow!”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Er . . . Is your Mum in? Can I talk to her?”

 

“She not here.”

 

“OK . . . will she be back soon?”

 

“Don’t know.”

 

“Where is she? I can drive . . . ”

 

“Don’t know.”

 

“OK . . . so how are you doing, Stephen? Is that your little boy over there?”

 

“What you want?”

 

I noticed a crowd was gathering, mostly children and youths, and had come between me and my car. “Look, Stephen, my parents died this week, both of them, their funeral’s on Friday.  . . . I want to talk to your Mum. She was like a mother to me, you know . . . ”

 

“I have no mothers while you have two mothers.”

 

“ . . . I . . . We treated your Mum very well, Stephen . . . ”

 

“She always say ‘Madam been a very poor mother to those boys’ . . . ”

 

“You’ve got no idea, have you? My Mum and Dad got a lot of abuse in the early days. We paid your Mum a lot more than the neighbours were paying their maids. She got longer holidays. We helped her with school fees . . .  They cut my Mum off, some of them. But she stood her ground, because that’s who she was. She cared. So stop treating me like I’m the fucking enemy, or you’ll never get anywhere.” His face was set at an unreachable distance. “Go fuck yourself!” I broke off and pushed through the onlookers to my car. I prepared to drive off, but could not find the will to turn the ignition. I stared hard ahead of me, and waited. Waited for I don’t know how long. My heart leapt as a stone struck my rear window; I heard some kids laughing. Another stone skidded across my roof. The inside of me screamed to be gone, but I would not heed it. I was watching the old woman a long time before I noticed her: a small, thin figure, hobbling up the road, her head bent, shaking, a hand raised to her cheek. She was nothing like Beth, but something took hold of me. I dashed out of my car and caught her just as she turned into the yard of Stephen’s house.

 

“Beth! Beth! Is that you? It’s me, Stuart, remember?”

 

The woman looked up. Immediately I was drawn to the scar on her right temple, deep like her skull had been cut and folded inwards. She grinned at me, but her eyes were everywhere: nowhere.

 

“You see,” said Stephen, coming through the doorway, “I mourn for my parents too. So now we are equal.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“They were attacked by robbers. My father was killed. I do not know if she understands. It is better if she does not.” Stephen put his arm round his mother and hugged her. She grinned at her son, giggling like a child.

 

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say . . . ”

 

“I’m sorry about your mother and father. My sister Monica told me. I remember them. I remember when I was very young, your father showed me how to make a paper aeroplane.” The little boy had emerged from the house and was watching me warily from behind Stephen’s legs. Beth noticed him there; she tickled him on the cheek.

 

“Thank you, Stephen, thank you very much.” I took one of Beth’s hands and squeezed it gently. She turned to me. “Khotso,” I said. One of the few African words I learned from her, it means ‘Peace.’

 

“Khotso,” she repeated.

 

* * *

 

Miss Tan is silent. I avert my eyes from her and stare ahead of me, across to the lawn - soft, thick and vivid green - on which a teenage boy and girl have just sat and fallen into each other’s arms.

 

She is silent, her legs folded beneath the blank page on her lap. I add that, on my way back from Soweto, I stopped at the roadside and cried for the first time since I was a child. I tell her that I’m about to write my first letter to Beth and Stephen.

 

Eva is silent. Perhaps she’s moved by what I told her. Or she could be embarrassed, or baffled by the whole thing. Perhaps she’s waiting for me to finish. Like she knows that it’s what happens next that makes all the difference.

 

For now, I don’t mind the silence.