The Sunday Hangman

1

Tollie Erasmus looked at the room in which he was about to die, and saw there the story of his life. Nothing had ever turned out quite the way he’d imagined it.

For once, however, he was very relieved to find this was so. In nightmare after nightmare, he had seen himself in a harshly lit execution chamber that had whitewashed walls and high fanlights, a scrubbed wooden floor and a crude beam, a long lever and a thick, bloodstained rope. Whereas, in fact, the chamber was far more like a hospital corner, screened off by green curtaining and lit by a warm orange glow; there was a clinical sparkle to the brass pulley, and the rope was so clean it must have been specially sterilized, assuring him of a swift, certain, scientifically humane end to his days.

Tollie was thinking very fast, absorbing all this in a twinkling while, on another level, wondering what had happened to all the in-between bits. He couldn’t remember his arrest, the trial, or the passing of sentence. It was like coming round in a dentist’s chair: you knew where you were and why, but you didn’t want to probe too much for fear of the onrush of pain.

His other senses were recovering now. He smelled the prison stink of disinfectant and tasted brandy. In his left hand was something squarish. His hand wasn’t visible. None of him was visible. He had been rolled up in a sheet so expertly he couldn’t move. A sheet wrapped round and round and round, and pinned neatly down the side with safety pins. He was sitting in a chair, bound to it by a wide, soft bandage that went round and round and round.

This couldn’t be right. Think, Tollie, think fast.

The shape of the room was wrong. Every weekday morning at Pretoria Central he’d waited in the soccer yard to be marched off to the workshops with the others. Facing him, as he stood there, had been two and a half stories of solid wall with only a fanlight near the top. If you didn’t guess right away that this was the gallows building, you soon enough learned, because on Tuesdays and Thursdays there was often a delay while they finished nailing down the coffin lids. Inevitably, you came to know its dimensions pretty well, and this room just didn’t go with them at all. Think faster.

The pulley for only one rope was another thing-and so was the amount of floor space. He knew for a fact that sometimes they strung up six kaffirs at once, and no way could six stand side by side on that area of trap door. Naturally, the warders liked to exaggerate the figures they dealt with, but he had seen the evidence of a multiple hanging with his own eyes. After leaving the soccer yard, you went up some steps at the side of the gallows building and along a passage between the door to the laying-out room and the door they brought them out of, over sawdust sprinkled to keep the drips of blood from sticking to your feet. And one Thursday morning, after an unusually long delay, he had actually seen six pairs of soggy khaki shorts being dropped outside the door for collection by the laundry. He recalled the warder winking at him, and wiping a hand on the wall.

He had ears as well. He couldn’t hear the sound that never ceased within the walls of Central-except, very abruptly, when the traps went down: the sound of the kaffir condemneds singing hymns and chanting in the great cell in B2. They always sang even louder before a hanging, making “Abide with Me” last all night, driving A and B sections crazy, which served the privileged bastards right. Although even in C, which was that much farther away, they got to you when the lights came on at five-thirty and there was that final upsurge before the long, empty silence.

Fighting to impose his sanity on an insane situation, Tollie put a simple question to himself: If I’m not in Central, then where the sod am I?

It wasn’t a dream, and logically he couldn’t be anywhere else, despite all the-

Tollie knew exactly where he was, and just why things hadn’t matched up to his experience. He had been away from Central a good while, and had forgotten the new building for the condemneds which had been going up on the rise just behind it. A really modern place, the papers had said, with all sorts of up-to-date ideas; the inmates had nicknamed it Beverly Hills.

In that same instant, everything slotted into place. The idea of having one gallows for all races had always surprised him; this was the gallows reserved for whites, which explained the curtains and the single rope. The constant hymn-singing from B2, back in the old block, had worked on everyone’s nerves; now, the kaffirs had been put in a new section that was sensibly soundproofed. As for the sheet around him, it was an improvement on the old straight jacket, which, as the warders had often complained, had never worked all that well on the really stroppy cases.

Having resolved the immediate conflicts set up by his awakening in a room like that, Tollie suddenly realized he’d never had a mental blackout before. In fact, he could remember quite distinctly-

“Don’t be frightened, son, you won’t feel any pain,” said a deep voice behind him. “We’re all here and it’s half-past five on the dot.”