The Pickup Part 4

Disappear (she has given him the word he needs), yes.

Again. Again! And again another name!

He sees her turning her head this way and that, in the trap. That's how it is.

If he says that one more time! So how it has to be is not what he will do about this letter, this doc.u.ment pa.s.sing a sentence on his life, but what we are going to do. She has friends, thank his G.o.ds and hers, anybody's: her friends who solve among themselves all kinds of difficulties in their opposition to establishment officialdom. They have alternative solutions for the alternative society, and there is every proof that that society is the one to which he and she belong: that letter makes it clear. She abrogates any rights that are hers, until they are granted also to him. This means she will follow no obedience to truthfulness ingested at school, no rules promulgated in the Const.i.tution, no policy of transparency as in the Board Rooms where the investment business code applies.

Julie does not tell him this; only by pressing herself against him, he's palpable, he hasn't disappeared from her, and holding her mouth against his until it is opened and lets her in. to the live warmth and moisture of his being.

He receives her, but cannot give himself. She understands: the shock, the letter finally come, followed him. tracked him down: for her, outrage, high on alarm, for him a numbing.

Let's go to the EL-AY. We have to talk about this.

Ah no. No, Julie. Not now, tonight. Let us stay alone.

Strangely, he began to take off the grease-darkened overalls as if he were shedding a skin, letting them fall to the floor and stepping slowly out of them. Perhaps he meant to get into bed, bed is the simplest offer of oblivion? But no.

I want to take a bath.

She heard the water gus.h.i.+ng a long time. She heard it slapping against the sides of the tub as he moved about within it.

She picked up the paper and sat with it in her hand. That first time: he asked to take a hot bath, she heard him there; when he came out holding the neatly-folded towel he was barefoot in his jeans and she saw his naked torso, the ripple of ribs under s.h.i.+ning smooth skin, the dark nipples on the pad of muscle at either side of the design of soft-curled black hair.

That's how it is.

They are to meet at The Table in his lunch break. That's the arrangement; she would not come by at the garage for him to join her*if one did not know what was to be done, at least here was a procedure begun, that trail that led through her from the garage to the cottage must be deflected. Look for him somewhere else.

She was there before him.

It's happened. See her face.

The friends in the EL-AY Cafe 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 papas 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 precipi-tately*even the habit of intimate openness quails before situations not in the range of experience. Indignation went back and forth across the cappuccino. That b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 s.h.i.+t!

*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 s.h.i.+fty- 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 h.e.l.l 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 Const.i.tution. Maybe. Could he make the case of political asy-lum*maybe not ... I'll go with you to the law library*my cousins 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 habitues coming and going in the EL-AY Cafe.

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, cant 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 Cafe. 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 s.e.x, 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, gla.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+t. (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 ba.n.a.l 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 mes.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sage 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, ent.i.tled 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 G.o.d. 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 (G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 sympa-thizers and the judgmental, the curt rejectors dictating the piece of paper, gabbling all about them in mimic travesty of the familiar cafe 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 grat.i.tude 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-cla.s.s woman, or man who lives with that woman, in this city.

Dr Archibald Charles Summers is the gynaecologist and obstetrician, MBBCh Wit.w.a.tersrand University, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, St Mary's London, Fellow of the Inst.i.tute of Obstetrics, Boston Ma.s.s, with a practice which is, so to speak, always over-subscribed. Call him fas.h.i.+onable, 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, inter-mediary 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 s.h.i.+ning bald head, outstanding ears and wors.h.i.+pful 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 relations.h.i.+ps*the recognized ones with lovers and/or husbands.

Dr Archibald's consulting rooms are a home: the studio portraits of his children as babies and graduates, the blow-ups of wild life photography, which is his hobby, posters proposing the beauties of the world from museums he has enjoyed on his travels. The bejewelled hands of his Indian re-ceptionist note any change of address of the habituee patient greeted once again, there is a bustle of several nurses with motherly big backsides, Afrikaner and black, calling back and forth to one another, who receive for urine tests the wafers peed upon by the patient in the privacy of a blue-tiled bathroom where a vase of live flowers always stands on the toilet tank.

His patients*his girls, as he refers to them, whether aged twenty or seventy*talk of him to one another as Archie. I've got my six-month appointment with Archie due next week.

I've just come from Archie*everything's okay, he says, he's pleased with me. And if everything is not okay, if rose thou art sick, Blake's invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm and eats out the heart of the rose has invaded with a cancer, Archie with the knife in his healing hand will cut it out so that blooming continues, for Archie is the deliverer of life.

The doctor has been married to and in love with his wife for thirty years at least. His seraglio of patients has nothing in common with the pa.s.sion for her which has never waned: the penetration of his expert right hand sheathed in latex into the v.a.g.i.n.as of his patients, young and desirable, ageing and des.e.xed, reduced to the subject of a kind of gut-exploration in the diagnostic divining of his fingertips, might be thought certain to end in a revulsion against women's bodies. Or that*what about that?*the sight of parted thighs, the smooth heat that must be felt through the latex*all this should be rousing, a doctor is a male beneath his white coat.

But neither professional hazard affects him, or ever has, even when he was a young man. He is unfailingly roused by the sight and scent and feel of his wife's body alone (she who was so hard to win to himself) and it is the man. not the doctor, who enters her and journeys with her to their joyous pleasure, as if there is always accessible to her an island in warm seas like one of those they have travelled to, together. When he talks to his seraglio women after examination, and sits a few moments on the edge of the steel table where they lie, he may be in contact with the body whose exposure he has reverently re-covered under wraps, he will place a rea.s.suring palm of the hand on the woman's shrouded hip while he tells her how she should conduct herself, they discuss the pills she needs to take, the exercise essential to maintain herself. They are two human beings equal in their vulnerability to the trials of life (of which his girls often confess to him their own specific ones), considering together how best one may survive. She knows this is not remotely the antenna of s.e.x touching her, and he knows she understands this. He does not need a nurse to be present*a precaution most gynaecologists employ*to rea.s.sure his girls of his respect.

'Archie' is also Uncle Archie, brother of Julie's father.

He used to fetch Julie to come and play with her cousins when she was a small girl. If she could have chosen a father, then, it would have been him. It still would be. He was a Gulliver over which children could climb and play. Teasing and story-telling. Her father took her to events on appointed days, to children's theatre and galas at his riding club; her mother did not think it necessary for both parents to be present, and stayed at home. Or perhaps she went to one of her lovers*but a child can't be aware of these accommodations in her parents' lives. (Nigel: poor man: if she happened to think of it, once herself adult.) She no longer had any contact with the cousins, but now and then, infrequent perhaps as her own presence, she would find this uncle among guests at her father's Sunday lunches. Julie would make for him among the people who were strangers although she might know well who were these components of Danielle's and her father's set*someone she was spontaneously pleased to see again, one with whom she felt an understanding that she was out of place in the company of the house built for Danielle.

The working lives, the temperaments of the brothers were widely different, but he was still part of her father's roots and perhaps Danielle was one of Archie's 'girls'? Julie herself, of course, had never consulted him; with Gulliver, a gynaecolog-ical examination would have seemed, if not to him, to her, anyway, some sort of incest. She's aware that she retains traces of the well-brought-up female's prudery, false modesty, despite the free exchange of all the facts of life at The Table.

We must think of everyone, anyone who.

Who?

Before they go to the famous lawyer together*if he can be approached at all on the basis of his a.s.sociation with her father, who must not have the situation made known to him at all*there must be someone. Not a father, but in place of that surely outgrown dependency. Someone removed from themselves*interrogating themselves for a solution even in their silences, removed from her kind of conventional wisdom, the guidance she relies on from The Table. She's going to speak to her uncle.

What uncle is that?

I've told you about him, my favourite grown-up, as a kid.

He knows people?

The Pickup 6(.

Well, he's prominent ...

So. If she won't go to her father, she is showing some sense of family as those his people naturally seek and find action from when you are in trouble. She comes to be embraced by him before she sets out; he holds her a moment as one grants this to a child being sent off to school.

Although she has been privileged to be given an appointment at all she has to wait among women in the bright air-conditioned room with its images of elephant herds, lion cubs and Bonnard boating parties. Among women: but who among them, manicured hands resting secure on pregnant belly-mounds under elegantly-flowing clothes, diet-slim middles emphasized by elaborate belts, young faces perfectly reproducing the looks of the latest model on a magazine cover, ageing skin drawn tight beneath the eyes by surgery, elaborately-braided heads bent together*two black women, wives of the new upper cla.s.s, laughing and chatting in their language; who, of all these can have any idea of what her version of a female complaint is, why she is here. In this, they are not even of the same s.e.x. One of them smiles at her but her head is turned away as his is, often, in the EL-AY Cafe.

Girls together. His girls. She has been amused at the way she has heard her uncle refer to them. But she is in her isolation.

The white-coated version of the uncle has risen from behind his wide desk and come to meet her with a hug. *At last you decide to see where I hang out, isn't that it! Shall we have coffee, tea, there's our little kitchen here, we've got them all, Earl Grey to Rooibos, you know, or is it juice, mango, apple*

There is the preamble of her apology for insisting on oust-ing some patient from an appointment, her thanks for his letting her walk in on him like this. *Apology! My dear Julie, how often do I get to see you! Oh I know from my own brood, the lives of generations fork out all over in different direc-77 Nadine Gordimer tions, the only crossroads we might meet at is at Nigel's, and neither your way nor Sharon's and mine run that route, we know. But that's fine. Nigel's such a Big Boy now, he's done so well, and they're wonderful together, he and Danielle*you and I must be glad about that, mmh?*

Sharon. At the mention of her uncle's wife's name she recognizes why, in her confusion of thinking of someone, anyone, it was not only the childhood bond that has brought her here. Archibald Charles Summers in his day betrayed all expectations of his choice of a girl from well-known Anglican Church families, members of country clubs and owners of holiday houses at the Cape where he was so popular as polo player and dance partner, in the old South Africa; it was when he was actually formally 'engaged' to what everyone agreed was a particularly lovely and suitable choice, a show rider, that he suddenly married a Sharon, a Jewess, daughter of a Lithuanian immigrant who had a luggage-c.u.m-shoe-repair shop in the very area where the backroom night clubs, bar hang-outs, the L.A. Cafe and the garage with its shed accommodation for an illegal had taken over now. Echoes of appalled family reaction to this marriage had drifted to the child's ears; for her, Sharon was the pretty redheaded mother of the cousins, dispenser of sweetmeats made of ginger and carrots, colour of her frizzy hair, you didn't get anywhere else, whose embrace was more and more cus.h.i.+oned by plumpness over childhood years.

The coffee he had summoned (Be a dear, Farida, tell Thabi wed like coffee*with biscuits, eh?) provided the comfortable transition of general interests. What career was she launched on now. she's always so adventurous, quite right, there are many changes among people, everywhere in the country, new ways to be active, explore. And they laughed together when she dismissed her present occupation, the old con jacked up for what is called 'new social mobility, public The Pickup

78.

relations. *Oh and he must tell her*he and Sharon had spent the long weekend at a certain guest farm in the Dra-kensberg*Sharon and I just became renewed, the walks in the bush, the hot sun and icy pools you can find where there's no-one*you jump in, in the buff*if you don't already know-of it you two must take off and go there. He doesn't know who the current partner may be, but he feels he ought to remember, from the most recent news he might have had in encounters with her.