A song in the morning

* * *

All Pretoria had heard the gunfire and the explosions.

Frikkie de Kok had heard them.

Pretoria is a valley city. The gunfire and the explosions on the southern hills were cradled above the community by the northern slopes. Distant gunfire and muffled explosions, and the city was an armed camp and the sounds were insufficient to disturb the celebration between himself and his assistant. Right that they should take some beers in the Harlequins bar after the assistant had performed well at dawn. A celebration for the two of them in the corner by the window going on long after the field floodlights had been switched off, away from the talk at the bar.

When it came to be time to gohome, the bar closed, the hangman did not know whether the gunfire and explosions were part of an army night exercise or the result of a terrorist attack.

At his front gate he waved his assistant goodnight. He came up the path. The porch light showed him that Hermione had been weeding in the evening after he had gone to the match. A fine woman, the rock of a fine family. He let himself inside, moved quietly into the darkened hall.

He could hear Hermione snoring softly. Down the corridor he could see the edge of light Under his boys' bedroom door. He thought they would be int erested to know the score of the match, and how the Springbok who played for Defence had performed. Fine boys, with a fine future. Boys such as his would survive whatever. He pushed gently at the door.

The flicker of a frown played at his forehead. Erasmus was curled in his bed, asleep and facing the wall and avoiding the light that was between the beds. Dawie's bed was empty, the coverlet not pulled back. He was annoyed. Dawie had been working so hard, and there was talk of a university scholarship, and all the school exams were important, and the boy should have been in his bed. He would tell Dawie of his displeasure, perhaps he was too soft on the boy…

He went into the living room.

He saw the white sheets of paper on his desk. He went to them. He picked them up, and recognised, the papers that had come that morning from the school, the entry forms for university application. The envelope was beside the papers.

The boy was normally so tidy. His leg brushed against an obstruction. He glanced down and made out the black leather, wide-built attache case with which he went to work.

The lock catch of the black leather case was unfastened. He cursed himself for his own carelessness in leaving the bag unlocked. He was as careless as his Dawie – heh, that was rich – father and son as careless each other. The smile extinguished. So fast developing, the picture in his mind.

His Dawie skimming through the university entrance form, and his Dawie seeing the bag that had never been opened in his presence, and his Dawie succumbing to curiosity, and his Dawie feeling for the lock and finding it unfastened, and his Dawie opening the case that carried the tools of the hangman's trade.

Chilled, Frikkie de Kok stood for a moment motionless.

He lifted back the flap of the black case. The ropes were coiled neatly in see-through cellophane bags. To count them he did not have to lift them out. New ropes, drawn from the prison store that day, signed for that afternoon. He loved his boy, and he did not know how his boy would react on finding that his father was the executioner in Pretoria Central.

There were four ropes. When he had brought his case home there had been five ropes. The ropes he would use at first light on Thursday. Only, because he loved his Dawie, Frikkie de Kok had never summoned the courage to tell his boy what work he did for the state…

He thought that he knew where to look.

Frikkie de Kok went to the window. He stared out onto his back garden. The ceiling lights of the living room threw shadows across the lawn. The lights groped as far as the old pear tree from which the autumn frosts had stripped the leaves.

Cold, shivering now, the hangman saw the slowly revolving shape.

•* •

The colonel stood beside the stolen Renault car. Above him the bleak outline of the hillside. With him was an army brigadier. Between the palms of his hand the colonel held a warming beaker of coffee. Technically the military had been called in to aid the civil power, in practice they had taken control, and the colonel was outranked and deferential, and damned tired because he'd not slept, and he had left his office at a quarter past two in the morning for the drive to Pretoria. He had no place in the cordon line. He could not have stayed away, could not have borne it in John Vorster Square with only the telephone and the telex machine to feed him the news.

The brigadier munched at a sandwich.

"… 1 tell you this, we were pretty poor getting the act into place. The operations room had us under sustained attack at Defence Headquarters, so we lost critical minutes.

I'll kick someone's arse for that. It's why we've only got two of them up there for definite, but those two are bottled, and anyway there's a blood trail so they're not going anywhere."

"Which ones, which two?"

"A sentry on Magasyn had an image intensifier on them when they came off the hill. Can't be sure, not through that thing, but he reckons they are both White. There was only one man came into Maximum Security and he was White… "

"So the other is Carew." The colonel heaved his relief.

"What'll you do?"

"It's what they're going to do. If one of them's hurt he'll need the medics. When they're cold enough and hungry enough and hurt enough, they have to come down. They've nowhere to go."

"I'd like them alive."

The brigadier smiled sardonically. "So you can put them back inside, hang them?"

"It's no help to me to have them dead."

"They have a rifle and they have an automatic shotgun, and I'm not having my men shot up by desperate men who are going to end on the rope anyway. If they shoot first, they're dead. If they don't shoot, they'll live. It's pretty simple."

"Would you allow me to broadcast that to them?"

The brigadier snapped his fingers, brought his adjutant hurrying. He asked for a loudhailer.

"You can tell them that if they don't shoot first they will not be harmed." The brigadier's voice dropped, "Then they'll be able to meet the hangman on another morning."

The colonel drank from his beaker and stared again up at the silent hillside. Around him were quiet voices, the occasional clatter of weapons being checked. There was the low throb of running engines. The crackle of brief radio messages. If there were only two on the hillside then he knew those two were James Carew and his son.

The loudhailer was handed to him.

The dawn was coming.

The blast of the message had slipped away, dispersed amongst the surrounding hills.

A mauve streak in the east.

They had talked through the night. They had met as strangers, and during the dark hours, in faintest starlight, they had lurched through understanding towards friendship.

Jeez sat with his arms gathered round his knees as if to find warmth for himself against the cold on the Skanskop. Near to freezing on the hillside and he wore only his prison tunic and cotton trousers and his thin prison shoes. Jack lay prone beside him, sometimes twisted by the agony in his leg, sometimes able to rest in relief between the spasms of pain.

They were together, it was as if they had never been apart.

They talked of Hilda Perry and her life with Sam and the house in Churchill Close, and Jeez seemed pleased at what he heard. They talked of Jack's job and Jeez chuckled at the stories of the blaster George Hawkins. They talked of the Foreign Office and of the man called Jimmy Sandham, and Jeez spat into the dew damp earth. They talked of a girl called Ros van Niekerk and of her brother with a club foot, and Jeez heard his son through. When the pain came to Jack then Jeez held his hand. When the pain spurted then Jeez's fingers clenched over his son's fist.

They could see the lights of the vehicles around the base of the Skanskop, a mesmerising cage of lights. When they were not talking they could hear the idling engines of the trucks and jeeps.

"You won't be afraid?"

Jack shook his head. Enough light seeping onto the hilltop for Jeez to see his son's face. Through the night he had talked to his son and he had not known his son's face. Jack gazed at the face of his father. A thin pinched face, stubble on the chin, short back and sides where there was hair to cut. Jack thought he saw a love in his father's face.

"Not having been a talking man, Jack, not any of my life, it's hard for me, to say what I want to say to you… To say thank you, that's not enough. Just crap to say thank you.

I'll tell it better if I say what you've given me…"

Jack watched his father's head, clearer against the sky.

"It won't be by them, that's rich to me. It'll be in our time, not at the time they'd open my cell up, the time they've decided. Because it'll be us, by ourselves, who decide the time, that's bloody fantastic to me. Free hands and free arms and free legs. No pinions on my ankles, no hood over my face, that's wonderful for me. Yesterday I couldn't have imagined how wonderful. You understand me, Jack?"

"I understand you, Jeez."

"You're the son that I made with your mother, you're the son that I bloody failed, and you came here to take me out when none of the other bastards were coming. You've given me the thing I wanted most."

Almost a shyness on Jeez's face. "Where I've been you don't get to see the morning coming, and you don't feel the wind on your face. I wanted most to see the morning coming, the sun rise, and feel the wind. And I don't have to be counting. Got that?"

"Got it."

"In that place you may be counting in months, weeks, days, I was down to counting hours. I'd got to counting meals. Day before yesterday I was counting how many socks I'd be needing. Day before yesterday they gave me a new uniform, but it wasn't new, oldest they'd got, look at it. You mess your clothes when you're hanged, Jack, so they give you an old uniform before they drop you off. You got me out of the counting. You got me to see a morning coming.

You got me to feel the fresh wind on my face."

He was between the pain. He was lying back. He was aware of the light building in the sky.

Jack said, "Everyone I spoke to, they all said it was impossible."

A dry smile from Jeez. "Probably was."

"The car was wrong."

"Just as wrong as when I said we had to stop and take the boys. We had to bring them, Jack."

"You don't get a choice. You had to take the boys, just as I had to come for you."

"They might just make it. Us going so slow might have drawn the flak off them. You know what, if they do make it, you might just get to have a street named after you in some real African shit-heap up in 'saka or Dar."

"I don't blame you for anything, Jeez."

"You're not afraid?"

"It's like I'm happy."

"You screwed them proper."

"Cheated them."

"It's the best morning of my life, the cleanest air. Thank you."

"For nothing, Jeez."

"So let's get this fucking show on the road."

"They don't take us."

"No way they take us."

"It'll be what they wanted in London."

"They'll be breaking open crates in Century, swilling champagne."

Jack said, "There must be some people who know, who'll want to tell the truth."

Jeez said, "They'll promote them. Promotion and the honours list, they're good silencers."

"I wanted to walk you down Whitehall. I wanted to take you into the Foreign Office. I wanted to see those bastards' faces."

"The bastards don't get to lose that often, not there, not here."

Jeez stood. For a long time he looked away to the clipped, half rising sun. He breathed in. He dragged the morning air into his lungs. He wondered how long it would be before the dandelion weed showed again in the garden of the exercise yard of C section 2. He clapped his hands. Jeez took off his tunic shirt and started to rip strips from it. He made five strips. He came behind Jack and put his hands under Jack's armpits and lifted him up. With the strips from his tunic, Jeez bound Jack's right leg. He knotted the strips tight.

Jeez checked the shotgun. He checked the rifle.

"You heard their message, what they want of us."

"They don't take us, Jeez."

"We're close as family, boy."

They stumbled forward to the edge of the hill. The pain swam again through Jack. Behind them were the walls of the old Skanskopfort, and the light of morning, and a gathering wind. It would be a short pain, the pain would not last. They were stiff with cold. It took them a few strides to find the rhythm. He wondered whether he could live with the pain from his stiffening, ruptured leg. He looked into Jeez's face, saw the chin jutting bloody-minded defiance. He saw his father's face, the face he had grown to know in a dawn haze.

They came to the edge.

Jack clung to Jeez's shoulder, supporting himself, trying not to shake, trying to hold back the agony tremors. Jeez had the rifle to his shoulder, aimed. Jack saw a jeep far below, a bristle of aerials. He saw the pygmy figures evacuating the jeep. He could hear the faint alarum calls. One shot, one bullet left. He understood the controlled pleasure at Jeez's mouth. Hitting back, after thirteen months. Aiming on the jeep, finger squeezing over the trigger, the report of the shot, the kick in Jeez's shoulder.

Jeez whipped the rifle down, gave it to Jack as a support, as a stick. Jeez took the shotgun. They came down the slope..

They were juddering forward, faster. Jack's arm tight across Jeez's shoulders. They were one, father and son.

Down the slope, and the pain gone from Jack's knee. Just the echo cracks of the shotgun and Jeez's laughter. Laughter pealing at the sun and the clean cold of the wind, and the blast of the shotgun. Jeez firing from the hip at the vehicles that seemed to soar to meet them, and all the time his laughter. No pain for Jack, only the laughter and the shotgun blasting. He didn't hear the shouted order of the brigadier.

He didn't see the barrel of a Vickers machine gun waver and then lock on their path. He didn't know that the colonel of security police howled his frustration in the ear of the brigadier and was ignored.

He only knew his own happiness and his father's freedom and the hammer whip of the shotgun.

They were wrong, all those who said it was impossible.

They were wrong because Jack had come for his father, and had taken him out.