The Pickup (7 page)

She was there before him.

It's happened. See her face.

The friends in the EL-AY Café also had been lulled by his presence become accepted in their haven; they received her with gazes of alarm and curiosity, darting suppositions. (It's bust up. He's walked out on her. She's seen through her oriental prince and told him, enough. Her dear papa's heard about the affair and cut off her allowance. What else?)

So she had time to tell them, to discuss what had happened before he joined her. Their reactions duplicated hers when it came to surface manifestations; the others, the depths of fear and emotions, they hesitated to approach so precipitately—even the habit of intimate openness quails before situations not in the range of experience. Indignation went back and forth across the cappuccino. That bastard at the garage!
That man! Must have been him, who else! You can't tell me any of the fellows he works with would want to go near to report to the fuzz! What a shit!

—Wait a moment.— The political theorist thinks before allowing himself to indulge in hasty accusations. —The garage owner would not be the one to report that kind of employee. If he did, he'd be reporting himself as hiring an illegal. That's a criminal charge, you know, my Brothers.— His quick, hard laugh is not offensive—a correction of the limitations of his white friends' awareness of the shifty workings of survival.

—The first thing, make an application for the order to be reviewed. You don't take it lying down.—

—You go with him to a lawyer, not one of those divorce and property sharks, a civil rights lawyer, what about Legal Resources, they must know a hell of a lot about this kind of situation.—

—No, no, you
do
go to a shark, and you pay him well— come on Julie, you can find the cash—

David, who is house-sitting at present, has his time to offer her. —I rather think it's a matter provided for in the Constitution. Maybe. Could he make the case of political asylum—maybe not … I'll go with you to the law library—my cousin's an advocate and he can do something useful for once, he'll get us in. You need to know all the relevant stuff, the small print, ready to throw at Home Affairs, you need to trip them up somehow—

Their poet laureate has slipped into his usual place, the cape of white hair tied back with a black ribbon today, catching up quietly, with swayings of the head, on what has happened to Julie's find. —He must go underground. There is a world underground in this city, in all cities, the only place for those of us who can't live, haven't the means, not just money, the statutory means to conform to what others call
the world. Underground. That darkness is the only freedom for him.—

Disappear. Julie, of whom this elderly man is particularly fond, among the friends, the one whom he's said he regards as his spiritual daughter—she has a clutching sense of his divining, affirming her dread. While she tries to listen to everyone at once with confidence in their alternative wisdom, she keeps erect in her chair looking out for her lover's appearance among the habitués coming and going in the EL-AY Café. She returns waves of the hand to those her eye inadvertently catches; his black eyes at last meet hers, her unique creature emerging from the forest of others.

Hi Abdu. Today they all get up from round The Table to receive him. Men and women, they embrace him, this side and that, in their natural way. It serves them better than words, now that the subject is there among them. All are around him, except the poet. He sits contemplating, saying to himself what no-one overhears, no doubt some quote from Yeats, Neruda, Lorca or Heaney, Shakespeare, that expresses the moment, the happening, better than anything said or done by The Table.

The victim thanks them politely; his hand taken up in hers, he sits down to listen. To be questioned and to hear his own replies. There is not much he can tell other than they drew from him with their brotherly welcoming when she introduced him to The Table months ago; or that he chooses to tell them? Sometimes she has to repeat to him something that has been said, as his head has been turned away—what is he seeking in this phalanstery of wine- and coffee-bibbers? Ever since he walked in with that piece of paper yesterday, his demeanour, his consciousness, by which one human receives another, has been that of seeking, an alertness that discards distraction. She orders coffee for him as she sees him glance at his watch; he's arrived only after half his lunch break is
over. Was there any sign that anyone at the garage knows? No-one said anything? No clue?

He drank his coffee in an unaccustomed way, spoke between gulps. —Nothing.—

—And the boss. Nothing emanating from him?— The follower of Buddhism thought there would be sensitivity to a change in atmosphere, even if there was no action.

She was interrupted—Look, man, can't you catch on, Teresa, I told you it's ridiculous to think the boss could turn himself in.—

Julie took careful note, in full attention, of all advice about what these good friends who knew how to look after themselves suggested should be done. She constantly referred this to him. He kept quietly gesturing he had heard. Their support surrounded him; as if he were one of them. As he got up to leave in the persona of the grease-monkey going back to the garage, he said without rejection—I have done all these things before.— There it was: the first time he was ordered to quit the country, when his permit expired.

She wanted to run after him but her place—it was to be left behind in the EL-AY Café. Ralph smiled at her, a victim for whom, when he told The Table he had AIDS, they could find no solution but the victim's own bravado of laughter.

When he came back to her from the garage that evening she was ironing a pair of the designer jeans he always wore even when he was living wretchedly in a shed. A towel was folded on the table they ate off, the jeans were spread upon it; she was pressing one hand over the other that held the iron, to emphasize a seam.

He had never seen her at a domestic task of this nature. Although they choose to live in a converted outhouse instead of a beautiful home with shaded terraces and rooms for every
private and public purpose, people like her have a black woman who comes to clean and wash and iron. Since he had moved in he had dropped his clothes into the basket provided, along with hers—she would put apart the overalls, stiff carapace made of the week's working dirt, with a pinned note that they must be washed separately.

She looked up at him from his garment and her eyes swelled with tears.

So it had to come: the tears, sometime. He came over and put the iron aside from her hand and turned her towards him. It's all right. He had to kiss her, this water of hers running salty into his mouth; all the fluids of her body that he tasted, her sweat, the juices of her sex, were there.

Then they went to sit on the sagging concrete step at the cottage door, looking out into the haggard tangle of fir and jacaranda trees darkly stifled by bougainvillaea, that was her end of the old garden where, far behind them a main house stood. She got up at once to go back into the cottage and fetch a bottle of wine—if bed is the simplest offer for oblivion, then among the friends wine is the best way of gathering nerve to tackle problems. She pulled the cork with an abrupt tug and took a swig, glasses forgotten. Handed to him, he put the bottle down on the earth. She began to go over with him the suggestions made by those, her friends, accustomed to get round authority. Again he listened to what he had heard before. Very practical, now, this Julie. She would go with the man David to a law library and familiarize herself with the relevant statute. She would ask around—people had to be wary when they revealed certain connections—about the kind of lawyer who was prepared to handle unconventional ways of evading laws. There must be many, many people like himself—the two of them—in the shit. (She knows he doesn't like to hear her using these words that everyone uses—really there must be the same sort of necessity in his own language but of course even if he
wanted to relieve his feelings in this banal way she wouldn't understand.) They also might as well make an appointment with Legal Resources, they'll know about conventional steps to take, human rights fundis must be well up in such matters.

The air was thickening about them in preparation for rain; he breathed it deeply several times. He was speaking to the black thicket of leaves and branches meshing a gathering darkness—Why do you choose those friends. Instead of your family.

For her, it's as if she has overheard something not intended for her. The Table; but why change the urgent subject! Reluctantly she is distracted. I don't know what you mean. Sometimes the limitations of his use of her language bring misunderstanding although she thinks she lovingly has taught herself to interpret him instinctively.

They are people doing well with their life. All the time. Moving on always. Clever. With what they do, make in the world, not just talking intelligent. They are alive, they take opportunity, they use the (snaps his tongue against his palate in search of the word) the will, yes, I mean to say, the will. To do. To have.

The crowd you saw at my father's house. Those?

Yes, your father and the other men. They know what they speak about. What happens. Making business. That's not bad, that is the world. Progress. You have to know it. I don't know why you like to sit there every day in that other place.

The wind that sweeps a path for rain suddenly came between them. She jumped up to go indoors or not to have to accept what he said, let it blow away from them. He came in behind her.

The bottle has fallen and the wine leaks out, its passage catching the light from the windows, a glisten, before the earth drinks it.

Inside, in the atmospheric pressure of the rising storm she sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on him in a way that asked of him what it was that he wanted.

You can go to your father. He knows many things. They don't know about anything. If they know, they can't do.

Oh no! No. No. That's impossible. No. He doesn't know about such things. No, no.

He moves swiftly into her recoil: afraid, after all, little girl afraid of father. —I don't mean this of me, mine. But other things that are not easy, straight. He knows. Believe it.

Almost weary—You can't understand.

And then she is taken by remorse because by saying this she has made him understand: it's because he is not one of them. He himself said it only a day ago, of the one,
anyone,
entitled to divest him of the overalls and take his place under the vehicles:
even this I'm wearing, this dirt, even a shed, a corner in the street to sleep in, that's his, not mine … whatever I have is his:
any one of them, those with the legal birthright, place in the social hierarchy, share of investments advised. Such a man. Already said:
Whatever I have is his:
you, your father's daughter are
his,
not mine.

How could he admire them, those other friends, her father's Chairmen of the Boards, Trustees of the Funds, Director-spiders at the centre of the websites that net the Markets, and at the same time not realize this? For the father, what a timely end to this latest crazy, impossible behaviour on the part of a daughter! The man deported—
finis,
the whole affair solved without any need of parental argument, father-daughter conflict of values, souring of relations, the usual result of any necessary interference on the part of the father. The law will do it. Save her from herself, thank God. Her father need only be there to help put together the pieces of her bereaved state, if she'll accept his love after her pickup (God knows where she found him) is once and for all out of the picture.

They went to bed before long. The kindest thing for both surely would have been to make love. But that's
his
right, that's
his
—the suitable young man who belongs at the Sunday
terrace lunches, the inside talk of the men the lover beside her admires so much.

The end; end of a winter, theirs together. The first rain of another season beat on and about the cottage like a surrounding crowd. After brittle months of dryness all the stuff of which their shelter was made—wood, iron roof, plaster on brick—came alive and creaked and shifted as if it crumpled them in a giant fist; as if the hammering of water and the materials given tongue by pressure and expansion were voices of the curious, the interfering, the scornful, the spurious sympathizers and the judgmental, the curt rejectors dictating the piece of paper, gabbling all about them in mimic travesty of the familiar café babble.

In the morning while she lay in the bath and he shaved carefully round the glossy pair of wings on his upper lip, he turned to her without seeing her nakedness. What about that lawyer? He did something for someone who killed. I heard a woman talking about it. You know him—he was there at your father's, he knows who you are. You could find him. The black man.

Well. It touches her with relief like gratitude that he has accepted she will not—cannot—go to her father. Yes, I suppose he would have been someone … but does he still practise law? I think he's given it up for money-making, you saw how he was one of the cronies.

You can find out.

Oh I can do that easily. But there's so little time, no time. We must think of everything, anyone who—

Three days of the edict gone by. He is looking at her, placed directly before her as she gets out of the bath aware of her nakedness, wraps her body in a towel. Think, think. She must: because he is there with her, hers; and not there, no name, no address, no claim on anyone.

You've surely heard of him if you are a middle-class woman, or man who lives with that woman, in this city.

Dr Archibald Charles Summers is the gynaecologist and obstetrician, MBBCh Witwatersrand University, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, St Mary's London, Fellow of the Institute of Obstetrics, Boston Mass., with a practice which is, so to speak, always over-subscribed. Call him fashionable, but that would not be entirely just; he is much more than that, he gives more than any regular specialist fees could ever cover. Women talk about him to one another with a reverent sense of trust exceptional between patient and doctor even in this branch of medicine in which the doctor is priest, intermediary in the emergence of new life, and the woman is its active acolyte. As an obstetrician, he is each woman's Angel Gabriel: his annunciation when he reads the scan of her womb—it's a boy. And his shining bald head, outstanding ears and worshipful smile are the first things she sees when he lifts life as it emerges from her body. Between births and after reproduction is no longer part of his patients' biological programming, he takes care—in the most conscientious sense—
of the intricate system inside them that characterizes their gender and influences—often even decides—the crucial balance of their reactions, temperaments, on which depend the manner in which they can deal with the other man-woman relationships—the recognized ones with lovers and/or husbands.