A song in the morning

* * *

The road was straight and the ground on either side of it was barren waste.

Jan talked, too bloody much. He turned his head and shouted through the visor of his crash helmet, and Jack had to lean towards him to hear anything through the thickness of his own helmet. For Jack it was little short of a miracle that the Suzuki moped was able to carry the two of them.

He felt a complete, conspicuous idiot perched on the pillion, squashed into Jan's spare helmet, towering above the kid as they dribbled along at thirty five miles an hour.

They were heading for Duduza, some fifty kilometres southeast of Johannesburg.

Staccato bursts of explanation from Jan.

Past mine workings, through small industrial towns, past a row of empty bungalows deserted because the White staff had left when the mine was exhausted and the homes had been left to the weather and to disintegrate alongside a shanty town for Blacks.

They were on a straight stretch. High grass beside the road. Jan leaned back to shout.

"A White woman was driving past here, couple of years back, before the state of emergency, she was pulled out of her car, killed. It was kids from Duduza did it. Just about here… "

Jack remembered what he had seen on the Pretoria road.

The picture was clear in his mind.

"At that time the Whites had killed hundreds of Blacks, and Blacks had killed two Whites, but the fascist law and order lobby went to work. It was vicious what the army and police did in Duduza. Most of the mothers tried to get their boys out, in girl's clothes, get them away and over the border. Just like the class of '76 in Soweto, there is a class of '85 out of Duduza. Those kids, now, they're in A.N.C. schools in Zambia or Tanzania. They'll come back when they're trained. There's no escape for the Boers…"

"I don't want a bloody debate," Jack yelled.

"You'll be in a debate when we get to Duduza."

"Then it'll keep until we get there."

Why should anyone help Jack Curwen? Why should anyone in Duduza lift a finger for Jack Curwen? He didn't give a damn for any of their slogans. His only commitment was to his father.

"You know that racism is endemic among Whites?"

"Not my business, Jan."

Warm air blowing past Jan's helmet, dust skimming from the tinted screen of Jack's visor.

"Take the courts. Take the difference between what they do for A.N.C. fighters, and what they do for the right wing scum of the Kappiecommando or the Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging, that's A.W.B., pigs. Are you listening, Jack?"

"Jan, shut up, for Christ's sake."

Jack heard Jan laugh out loud, like he was high.

"Jack, listen… If a Black throws a petrol bomb it's terrorism, if it's the White backlash then it's arson. A Black explosion is treason, a White explosion is a damage to property charge. A Black arms cache is plotting to overthrow the state, but if he's White he's done for possession of unlicensed weapons… Isn't that racism?"

"I'm not listening to you, Jan."

"You better make the right noises when we get to Duduza, if you don't want a necklace."

Jack wondered what the hell the kid was shouting of. He didn't ask. Right now he thought the kid was a pain. He thought that if he hadn't needed the kid he would happily have jumped, walked away from him… But he had involved Jan van Niekerk, and he had involved Ros van Niekerk. He was leading the crippled boy and the office worker girl towards the walls and the guns of Pretoria Central.

"I'm sorry, Jan. You have to forgive me."

Jan turned his head. Jack saw the wide grin behind the visor screen, and the moped swerved and they nearly went off the road.

"Nothing to forgive. You're giving me the best damned time of my life. You're kicking the Boers in their nuts, and that's nothing to forgive… "

The shouting died.

Over Jan's shoulder Jack saw the dark line of the edge of the township. Red and black brick walls behind a fence of rusting cattle wire. Low smudges of dull colour, nothing for the sun to brighten.

Jan had told Jack, before they had started out, that Duduza was the only place where they had the smallest chance of raising his munitions. He was too junior in the Movement to be able to contact senior men at short notice.

Part of the protective cover screen, in place to maintain the command chain's security, meant that a junior, a Jan van Niekerk, only responded to anonymous orders in his dead letter drop. Jan had said there was a Black he had once met, at a meeting in Kwa Thema township, a lively happy faced young man with a soft chocolate au lait complexion who had said his name and said where he lived, and been too relaxed and too confident to stay with the ritual of numbered code indentifications. Jan had said that the young Black's name was Henry Kenge.

They saw the block on the road into the township.

Four hundred metres ahead of them. Two Casspirs and a yellow police van.

Jan had been very definite, that he hadn't any way of promising that he would find Henry Kenge. Couldn't say whether he was one of the thousand detainees, whether he had fled the country, whether he was dead. Jan had said that trying to trace the man was the only chance he knew of getting weapons by that evening. He had told Jack that it would be many days until he was contacted through the dead letter drop. The Movement would wait with extreme caution to see whether the death of Jacob Thiroko had compromised that part of the Johannesburg structure that had known of the incursion towards Warmbaths. Jan had said that every person who had known of the incursion would be isolated for their own safety, for the safety of those who dealt with them. And they would all sit very tight for a while anyway until it was discovered how Thiroko was betrayed. Jan said he would have to be under suspicion himself, having known of the rendezvous.

The moped slowed. Not for Jack to give advice. For the boy to make his own mind. Jack's frustration that he was a stranger, without experience, unable to contribute.

The jerk off the tarmac. Jan revved all the power he could drag from the engine. They surged and bumped away across the dirt, away from the road and the police block.

Jack clung to Jan's waist.

The boy shouted, "Carry yourself well, and for God's sake don't look scared. Scared is guilt to these people.

If you see me move, follow me. If we have to get out it'll happen fast. The mood changes, like bloody light-ning… and this is a hell of a scary place we're going into."

Jack punched the boy in the ribs.

Away to the right there was the bellow of a loudspeaker from the police block. Jack couldn't hear the words. He thought they were beyond rifle range as they slipped the cordon.

There were holes in the fence. Jan searched for one that was wide enough for the Suzuki and jolted through it.

Jan cut the engine.

A terrible quiet around them, and then a dog barking. No people. Jan pushed his moped. Jack was close behind him.

They went forward down a wide street of beaten dirt.

Jack thought that Soweto was chic in comparison. He saw overturned and burned cars. He saw a fire-gutted house. He saw the dog, tied by string to a doorpost, angry and straining to get at them.

"Straight roads make it easier for the police and military to dominate. They haven't electricity here, the water's off street taps, but they've good straight roads for the Casspirs."

Jack hissed, as if frightened of his own voice, "Where the hell is everybody?"

"A funeral's the only thing that gets everyone out. They've had enough funerals here in the last eighteen months. It's a tough place, it's hot. There's not a Black policeman can live here any more, and the Black quisling councillors are gone.

Shit… "

Jan pointed. It was a small thing and without having it pointed to him Jack wouldn't have noticed. Jan was pointing to a galvanised bucket, filled with water, in front of a house.

Jack thought of it as a house but it was more of a brick and tin shack. He saw the bucket. When he looked up the street he saw there were buckets filled with water in front of each house, each shack, in the wide street.

"Means bad trouble. The water is for the kids to wash the gas out of their faces. If there's going to be trouble everybody leaves water on the street."

"If you don't put the water out?" Jack asked.

"Then they would be thought of as collaborators and they get the necklace. Hands tied behind their backs, a tyre hung on their shoulders, that's the necklace. They set light to the tyre."

"Bloody nice revolution you've started."

"It's hard for these people to touch the police, they haven't a cat in hell's chance of hurting the state. What are they left with, just the chance to hurt the Black servants of the state."

"So what do we do? Scratch our backsides, then what?"

"We just have to wait."

It was a huge funeral.

The gathering was illegal. Under the amendment regulations following the state of emergency it was prohibited that mourners should march in formation to open air funeral services. It would have required a battalion of infantry to have prevented the column reaching the grave that had been prepared for the body of a thirteen-year-old girl, knocked over ten days before by a speeding Casspir.

Sometimes the regulations were enforced, sometimes not. Enforcement depended on the will of the senior police officer for the area, and the size of the forces available to him.

On this Sunday the military were not present. The police seemed to have stayed back and watched from a distance as the migrant ant mass of men and women and children took the small white wood coffin to the cemetery.

An orderly march to the grave. Hating faces, but controlled. The young men who had charge let the priest have his say, and they allowed the bereaved family to get clear in an old Morris car, and they gave time for the old men and the women and the small children to start back towards the township.

There was organisation of a sort in what happened afterwards.

A single police jeep was out in front of the main force, there to overlook and photograph. A shambling charge at the jeep, and the driver had lost his gears, and lost time, and the men who guarded the photographer and his long lens had fired volleys of bird shot and gas to keep the running, stoning crowd at a distance.

The driver of the jeep never found his gears. The crowd surged on, vengeance within reach. The police ditched the jeep, left it with the engine howling, ran for their lives. Good and fit, the policemen, and running hard because they knew the alternative to running fast, knew what happened to policemen who were caught by a funeral mob. The photographer didn't run fast, not as fast as he had to run. The lens bouncing awkwardly from his stomach, and the camera bag on his shoulder, and none of the policemen with guns taking the time to cover him.

The officers commanding the police were still shouting their orders when the fleetest of the mob caught up with the photographer. The photographer was White and a year and a half short of his fiftieth birthday. A growl in the mob, the breath intake of a mad dog.

The hacking crack of rifle fire, aimed at random into the crowd at four hundred metres. The crowd of youths not caring because the photographer was caught.

The Casspirs came forward, and the kids fled before them, back towards the township.

The photographer was naked but for one shoe and his socks and the camera with the long lens that lay on his belly.

His clothes had been taken from him as vultures take meat from bones. He was dead. An autopsy would in due course state how many knife wounds he had received, how many stone bruises.

The start of a routine township battle. An hour of unrest.

Shotguns and rifles and tear gas grenades from behind the armour plate of the high built Casspirs. Petrol bombs and rocks from the kids. Pretty unremarkable happenings for the East Rand.

The police saw the kids back into the warren streets of Duduza and left them to their destruction. Eighteen months after the start of the petrol bombing and the rock throwing against the Black policemen's homes and councillor's homes there was little left for the crowd that was worth burning.

Two shops were destroyed by fire. The days were long since gone when the elderly would try to prevent the kids burning a shop out. To have tried to have saved a shop from the fire was to have invited the accusation of collaborator.

Two shops burned.

Four kids died. Eighteen kids were treated for buck shot injuries in Duduza's unregistered clinic. No chance of them going to hospital.

A thirteen-year-old girl had been successfully buried.

Sunday afternoon in Duduza, and time to bring the buckets indoors.

• •*

His eyes were red rimmed.

He sat on a wooden chair in a small room.

Faces peered at him through the cracked glass of the window. Jack looked straight ahead, looked all the time at the man who had been introduced as Henry Kenge, and at Jan.

He dabbed his eyes with his water-soaked handkerchief, and each time he did it he heard the pitter patter of laughter from all around him.

He had made his speech. He had asked for help. He had been heard out. He had been vague and unspecific until Jan had waved him quiet, taken over and whispered urgently a statement of intent in the ear of the one identified as Kenge.

He was filthy from the ditch he had lain in as the Casspirs had rumbled down the main street. With Jan in the bottom of a ditch that doubled as a street sewer.

He thought that if the youngsters he had seen that afternoon had been Black kids on the streets of London or Birmingham or Liverpool then he would have rated them as mindless and vicious hooligans. He thought the kids of Duduza were the bravest he had ever known. So what was the morality of that? Fuck the morality, Jack thought.

Kenge brought Jan a holdall. Jan passed the bag to Jack.

He counted five R.G.-42 grenades.

Jack tugged at Jan's sleeve. "This shouldn't be in bloody public."

"The necklace has made ashes of informers, they're scrubbed out of Duduza. The eyes of the security police have been put out with fire, that's why they're losing…

They have a song about you. They don't know who you are, but they have a song in praise of you. They made a song about the man who carried the bomb into John Vorster Square."

Jack shook his head, like he'd been slapped. "You told them about that?"

"You've been given half of this township's armoury. You grovel your thanks to them."

When they left they could see the lights of the road block vehicles. Jan kept his own headlight off and drove cross-country in a loop taking them well clear of the block.

For a short time a searchlight tried to find the source of the engine sound in the darkness, and they stopped in shadow until it lit upon some other threat, and then rode on.

Jack thought he was pretty damn fortunate to have the grenades. He appreciated that after Thiroko was killed Jan would be isolated from the Movement. That's what any Movement would do. He pounded Jan's back, in gratitude, in relief to be out of Duduza.

Ros was at the flat in Hillbrow. She showed Jack what she had brought. Only after he had seen and handled the pump action shotgun and the two revolvers and the ammunition did Jack realise that she had changed herself.

He thought Ros van Niekerk was quite lovely.

He had fifteen pounds of explosives and detonators and firing fuse and five grenades and a shotgun and two revolvers.

And he had a crippled student to help him, and a girl who worked in an insurance office and who was lovely.

No going back, but then there had never been a time for going back.