A song in the morning

13

He took a taxi from the hotel to the zoo gardens.

Jack had memorised his instructions and flushed the sheet of paper away down the lavatory.

The driver hissed against the wooden toothpick that was clamped in his teeth through each detail of the bland police statement of unrest overnight in the Cape and the East Rand on the early morning news. Two shot dead by the police in the Cape, and a Black woman burned to death in an East Rand township.

"Seems to be getting worse," Jack said.

The taxi driver looked over his shoulder. "You'd need to be smiling from your cheeks to your backside to think it's getting better."

"What has to happen for it to get better?"

The taxi driver settled comfortably in his seat, like the question was a box of chocolates, to be enjoyed.

"My opinion, take a tougher line with the Blacks. That's not what we're doing at the moment. Right, the State President's put the military and the police into the townships. Wrong, each time he makes a speech he's talking about reform. Result, they think they're winning, they reckon if they keep up the murder and the arson that they're on their way to government. On the one hand the State President is trying to intimidate the Blacks into ending the violence, on the other hand he's trying to buy them off with promises.

The two don't sleep in the same bed… "

Jack slid out of reach of the driver's eyes in the rear-view mirror, took a fast, deep breath, and asked: "Did you know the taxi man, the one they're going to hang?"

"Carew, that bastard?"

"Did you know him?"

"I didn't myself. I've a friend who did."

"What sort of fellow was he?"

"Mystery man, that's what my friend says. When the name was in the papers he just didn't believe it, says he was a very private fellow."

A recklessness in Jack. "Where did he live?"

"He had a flat, behind Berea, furnished, that's what my friend says. When he was arrested he gave instructions to his lawyer man that everything in the flat should be sold, went to a children's home charity. My friend says there wasn't much, bits and pieces and his clothes, but they've all gone, like he knew he was never coming out. My friend says that he used to talk quite a bit with this Carew, but he never knew anything about him. I mean, they didn't talk about family, just used to talk about the motor, that sort of thing.

Long time ago, he wrote to ask whether Carew would like a visit, and the letter came back from the authorities that Carew didn't want any visit… What's your interest?"

Jack said, "I read about it in the English papers."

He was dropped at the main entrance.

He must have been one of the first customers that morning because the wide sloping grounds with the autumn in the trees were near-deserted. He walked over the dun yellow parched lawns. He did exactly as he had been instructed.

He went to ihe cafeteria where they were still putting out the tables, and he ordered a cup of coffee. When he had drunk it he walked away past the big wingspan vulture in a tall cage, and past the compound where a young gorilla gambolled, and past the green water pool of the sea lions.

He understood why the instructions had demanded that he followed a set route. He was being watched and checked to see that he had no tail. He climbed the hill and strolled slowly past the big cat enclosures. Well before the heat of the day and the leopards and the jaguar and the lions were pacing. He sat on a bench in front of the Bengali tigers. He didn't look around, he made no attempt to identify the people he assumed to be watching him. Up again and past the stink of the elephant and the rhino, past a bee swarm of tiny Black children out with their teacher, past a party of shambling mencaps with their nurses. He followed the instructions.

He went up the long hill towards a huge memorial, to British victory in the Boer War of nearly a century ago. He drifted into the military museum. More schoolchildren, but middle teens and White, and with a pretty young teacher who had a strident voice as she quizzed her pupils on Bren gun carriers, Churchill tanks, 25 pounders, an 88 mm recoilless anti-tank. They'd be needing that knowledge, the little sods. Their country was going into automatic rifles and armoured personnel carriers and White conscripts in the townships, and by the time these kids were fattened up then it might have come down to tanks and artillery. It was a bad image for Jack. His thoughts ran fast to Potgieterstraat and Defence Headquarters and the guns of the sentries and the fire slits on the walls of Local. A bad awful bloody express train of thought because he had never believed that Beverly Hills could be so well protected…

If he had known it would be that well protected then Jimmy Sandham would be alive, and Duggie would be alive, and Jack Curwen would be in his office, at his desk, on the north side of Leatherhead.

Bit bloody late, Jack.

He sat on a bench. He waited.

Jan and Ros had argued half the night away. They had argued in the car on the way to the zoo. The argument had continued as they tracked the Englishman.

"Violence doesn't change anything."

"The Boers listen to violence, they don't listen to debate."

"Blowing people up, killing and maiming people, won't change the government."

"Change will only come when control of the townships is lost."

"The state is committed to real change, all that's needed is a breathing space for the moderates on all sides to come forward and negotiate."

"The moderates? What do they want to talk about? About opening up Whites beaches for non-segregated bathing? Do you think they care in the townships, where they're queuing up for charity food parcels, about a nice little swim on a Whites Only beach? The moderates aren't relevant, might have been twenty years ago, not now. It's about power, not about which beach you're allowed to swim on. Anyone who has power will never hand it over voluntarily. The Boers'll have to be burned out of power."

"Your way, Jan, only slows the pace of change."

"They're playing with reform, Ros. They want to get the Americans off their backs, so they can go back to living the way they've always lived, the White boot on the Black throat."

"Are you ashamed of being White?"

"I've no shame, because I'm fighting against a White evil.

I didn't ask you to spy in my room. You can get out of my life."

"I'm stuck with your bloody life. I'm your sister. On your own you're dead or you're locked up. I won't turn away from you. I wish I could, and I can't."

For half an hour they watched the Englishman move through the zoo's gardens. At the sea lions and the compound for the big cats they had split and gone in opposite ways so that each of them could be sure they were free of a tail. Jan thought that his sister learned fast. If there had been a tail he believed they would have seen it.

For Jan there was the fascination of seeing the clean shouldered back of the man who had achieved the remarkable, and carried a bomb into John Vorster Square. For Ros there was the fascination of seeing the man who had come as an activist to their country, who was capable of murder.

For what he had achieved, Jan thought the stranger was a hero. For involving her brother, Ros thought him an enemy.

They came into the military museum.

Through the heads and shoulders of the schoolchildren, between the snub barrels of the artillery pieces, they saw him. They were a boy and a girl out walking, there was nothing about them to excite suspicion. They looked at the man who sat hunched on the bench.

Ros said, "Once you've spoken to him then you're more deeply involved than ever before. You could turn round, you could go home. Father would get you a ticket, you could fly out of the country tonight. You could be safe."

Jan said, "I don't run away."

"You don't run away because you can't run…" She hated herself.

"They don't listen to reason. Last year when they hanged Ben Moloise they had petitions from all over the world.

They didn't give a shit. They strung him up because what the rest of the world says doesn't c o u n t… "

"He was convicted of killing a policeman."

"Now they're going to hang five men, and again the rest of the world's pleading for mercy. They don't give a shit.

This man knows it, fight force with force. Fight the force of John Vorster Square with the force of a fire bomb."

"And Pretoria Central?"

"I don't know," Jan said.

He had the diagrams of the gaol in the inner pocket of his windcheater jacket.

"You're getting to be a real creep, Jan."

They went forward, Jan limping and ahead, and Ros trailing him.