Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

20

I must admit that I remain endlessly fascinated by the small crossroads of life, the forks in the road, seldom indicated, rarely a road sign. Only visible in retrospect.

I joined the police force because I peered through a wooden fence one Saturday afternoon. I joined the police because a detective gave me a second chance with firm warmth – a father figure? Did I join the Force because my father died young? Would I have joined the police if I hadn’t lusted after Baby Marnewick? Would I have joined if Baby Marnewick hadn’t been murdered?

There was a Gauloises advertisement at the movies in those days. A French artist who made clever charcoal or pencil drawings on paper. At first it seemed as if he was drawing a female nude – the sexy breasts, the hips, the waist. But as he drew on, the female figure became an innocuous Frenchman with a beret, a beard, and a cigarette.

The crossroads, the road signs, the milestones, were only visible when each picture was completed.

I joined the police.

With my mother’s blessing. I think she suspected that it had something to do with the Marnewick murder, but her perspective was speculative and wrong. I think she had had other dreams for me, but she…was my mother: she supported me.

What can I tell you about Police College in Pretoria? Rookies, young men from every level of society thrown together. We paraded and learned and carried on like young bulls in the evening. We argued and talked nonsense and laughed and dreamed of more sex and less physical effort. We paraded and perspired in classes without air-conditioning and made beds with perfect edges and learned to shoot.

Let me be honest. The rest of my intake learned to shoot. I shut my eyes and eventually, with the minimum number of marks, managed to stay on the course. From the start, firearms were my Achilles’ heel, my nemesis as a policeman. It was inexplicable. I liked the smell of gun oil, the glimmer of black metal, the cold, effective lines. I picked up the weapons with the same amount of bravado and the same feeling of power as did the other recruits, handled them, and fired them. But the projectiles I sent off by pulling the trigger, the physics I initiated, were always less effective than every other rookie’s. I was teased endlessly about it but it didn’t damage my ego, mainly because my achievements in the tests and examinations tipped the scales of mutual respect in another direction. In theoretical work, on paper, with a set of questions, I had no equal.

And then the training was over and I was a constable in a uniform and I asked for Stilfontein or Klerksdorp or Orkney, heaven only knows why, and got Sunnyside in Pretoria and for the next two years locked up drunken students and dealt with disturbing-the-peace complaints and smoothed down marital scraps in thousands of apartments and investigated burglaries from cars and served in the charge office and learned how to fill in SAPS forms, over and over and over again, adding to the tons of paper of the documentation of justice.

And was branded as the classical-music constable, the one who read (but couldn’t shoot worth a damn). For the Sunnyside office of the SAP I was what a teddy bear was for the center line of a high school rugby team: a kind of totem, a defense against the darkness of total cultural decline in a city area of gray crime.

Because that was our daily task: not the screaming colors of injustice committed in hatred, but the drab world of minor, white-collar transgressions, of human weakness on the colorless part of the police palette.

I lived in a bachelor pad with a single bed and a table and a chair that my mother gave me and I made a bookcase with bricks and planks and saved for three months for the deposit on a Defy stove and taught myself to cook from magazines and read virtually every book in the library and worked shifts that didn’t do much for romance or socializing, but I did manage, however, among the enormous number of lonely young girls in Sunnyside, to strike it lucky, one or two or three nights per month of wriggling, struggling, despairing sex. They were back scratchers, virtually without exception, as if they wanted to leave a physical mark that would outlast the brief flame of physical passion.

There were times when I could not remember why I was a servant of justice. I first had to think back to Stilfontein, to stand at the wooden fence of shame again, to drink at the fountain of inspiration.

It was temporary, everything, a purposeless existence, a rite of passage, marking time, wasted years, growing years, growing-up years.