Jump and Other Stories

Keeping Fit

Breathe.

Breath. A baby, a chicken hatching — the first imperative is to breathe.

Breathless.

Breathe! Out of this concentration, in which he forgets even the rhythm of his feet, is a bellows pumped by the command, the admonition, the slap on the bottom that shocks the baby into inhalation — comes his second wind. Unless you go out like this, morning and evening, you never know what no one can remember, that first discovery of independent life: I can breathe.

It came after twenty minutes or so, when he had left behind houses he had never entered but knew because they were occupied by people like himself, passed the aggressive monitoring of dogs who were at their customary gateposts, the shuttered take-away, prego rolls & jumbo burgers, and the bristling security cage of the electricity sub-station. These were his pedometer: three kilometres. Here where the grid of his familiar streets came up short against the main road was the point of no return. Sometimes he took a circuitous route back but this was the outward limit. Not quite a highway, the road divided the territory of Alicewood, named for the daughter of a real estate developer, from Enterprise Park, the landscaped industrial buffer between the suburb and the black township whose identity was long overwhelmed by a squatter camp which had spread to the boundary of the industries and, where there was vacant ground, dragged through these interstices its detritus of tin and sacking, abutting on the highway. Someone — the municipality — had put up a high corrugated metal fence to shield passing traffic from the sight.

At six o’clock on a Sunday morning the four-lane road is deserted. A wavering of smoke from last night’s cooking fires hangs peacefully, away on the other side, the sign of existence there. In the house he has left, a woman, three children, sleep on unaware that he has risen from her bed, passed their doors, as if he has left his body in its shape impressed beside her and moved out of himself on silent running shoes. The exhausted tarmac gives off a bitumen scent that is lost in carbon monoxide fumes during the week; he is quietly attracted, at his turning point, to mark time a few paces out on the road, having the pounded surface all to himself. It is pleasant as a worn rubber mat underfoot.

He began to run steadily along it. Now no landmarks of distance; instead, memory in a twin stream started to flow in its own progression, the pumping of his heart sending blood to open up where in his brain cells flashes of feeling and images from boyhood were stored at one with the play of fragments from the past week. Tadpoles wriggling in his pocket on his way home from school and the expression of irritation round his accountant’s mouth when he disputed some calculation, the change in the curve of a girl’s buttocks as she shifted her weight from one leg to another standing in front of him in a bank queue on Friday and the sudden surfacing of his father’s figure bending about in a vegetable garden, looming, seen at the height of a child who has done wrong (run away, was it?); the same figure and not the same, with an arthritic leg laid out like a wooden one and the abstracted glance of someone able now only to move towards death, the scent of the girl in the bank as her sharp exhalation of impatience sent the message of her body to his — all this smoothly breathed, in and out. In the flowing together of contexts the crow of a cock in the city does not come incongruously but is more of a heraldic announcement: day, today, time for ghosts to fade, time to return. The cock-crow sounds from over there behind the fence, a place which itself has come about defying context, plan, definition, confusing the peasant’s farmyard awakening with the labourer’s clock-in at the industries close by.

Of course, they kept chickens among whatever dirt and degradation was behind that fence. He must have done another couple of kilometres; there were no more factory buildings but the shanties occupied the land all along the other side of the road. Here in places the metal fence had collapsed under the pressure of shelters that leant against it and sections had been filched to roof other shacks, yet the life in there was not exposed to the road because the jumbled crowding of makeshift board and planks, bits of wrecked vehicles, cardboard and plastic sheeting closed off from view how far back the swarm of habitation extended. But as he turned to go home — it burst open, revealing itself.

Men came flying at him. The assault exaggerated their faces like close-ups in film; for a vivid second he saw rather than felt through the rictus of his mouth and cheek muscles the instant gaping fear that must have opened his mouth and stretched his cheeks like a rubber mask. They rushed over him colliding with him, swerving against him, battering him. But in their passage: they were carrying him along with them. They were not after him. Fuses were blowing in the panic impulses along the paths of his brain, he received incoherently the realization that he was something in their path — a box they tripped over, an abandoned tyre-tube bowling as they kicked past it — swept into their pursuit. What had seemed to be one of them was the man they were after, and that man’s terror and their rage were a single fury in which he hadn’t distinguished one from the other. The man’s shirt was ripped down the back, another hobbled wildly with one shoe lost, some wore red rags tied pirate-style round their heads, knobbed clubs swung above them, long pieces of wire strong and sharp enough to skewer a man armed them, one loped with a sledge-hammer over his shoulder, there were cleavers, and a butcher’s knife ground to sword-point and dangling from a bracelet of plaited red plastic. They were bellowing in a language he didn’t need to understand in order to understand, the stink of adrenaline sweat was coming from the furnace within them. The victim’s knees pumped up almost to his chin, he zigzagged about the road, the road that was never to be crossed, and the tight mob raced with him, hampered and terrible with their weaponry, and he who had blundered into the chase was whirled along as if caught up by some carnival crowd in which, this time, the presence of death was not fancy dress.

The race of pursued and pursuers broke suddenly from one side of the road to the other, he was thrust to the edge of the wild press and saw his chance.

Out.

The fence was down. The squatter shacks: he was on the wrong side. The road was no longer the sure boundary between that place and his suburb. It was the barrier that prevented him from getting away from the wrong side. In the empty road (would no one come, would no one stop it) the man went down under chants and the blows of a club with a gnarled knob as big as a child’s head, the butcher’s knife plunged, the pointed wires dug, the body writhed away like a chopped worm. On the oil stains of the tarmac blood was superimposing another spill.

He fled down among the shacks. Two bare-arsed children squatting to pee jumped up and bounded from him like rats. A man lifted the sack over an aperture in tin and quickly let it fall. There were cooking pots and ashes and a tethered donkey, the scabby body of a car like the eviscerated shell of a giant beetle, lamed supermarket trolleys, mud walls, beer cans; silence. Desertion; or the vacuum created by people left behind by the passage of violence, keeping out of it, holding breath. The haphazard strips of muddy passage between whatever passed for walls were so narrow he seemed to have entered a single habitation where, unseen, people all around followed him — his breathing, his panting breath — from room to room. A white man! He felt himself only to be a white man, no other identity, no other way to be known: to pull aside a sack and say, I’m in brokerage, give his name, his bona fide address — that was nothing, these qualifications of his existence meant nothing. And then a woman appeared out of a shack that had a door. — Get inside. It’s dangerous. — A firm grip, a big butterscotch-coloured upper arm in a tight-filled short sleeve, yellow- and pink-flowered. He ducked into her doorway with a push from her in his back.

— They terrible, those people, they’ll kill anybody. They will. — She had the strict face formed by respectability, a black woman churchgoer’s face, her eyes distant and narrowed behind butterfly-shaped spectacle frames with gilt scrolls. Other people in dimness were staring. A piece of canvas hung over what must be a square of window. Light came only from the gaps between tin walls and the roof low on his head. — You see, I run… I was just on the other side of the road, out for a run …—

A young man who was turned away from this apparition, paring his nails, children, a stooping man in pyjama trousers and a pullover, a girl with a blanket wrapped round her body below naked shoulders, doek awry from sleep.

He had a momentary loss of control, wanting to collapse against the woman, clutch her used big body under her apron and take the shield of her warmth against his trembling. — What’s happening — who was it — he’s dead there, in the road.—

She spoke for everyone. — From the hostel. They come from the hostel, they come in here and kill us.—

— I read about it. — His head wagged like a puppet’s, down, down to his chest.

— You read about it! — She gave a short slap of a laugh. — Every night, we don’t know. They come or they don’t come—

— Who are they?—

— The police send them.—

He could not say to this woman, That’s not what I read.

— Tomorrow it can be him. — The woman uncrossed her fine arms and presented the profile of the young man.

— Him?—

— Yes, my son. Come and knock on the wall shouting it’s all right, call him comrade so he’ll believe, and if he doesn’t go out, break in and beat my husband, there, you see him, he’s an old man already — take my son and kill him.—

Nothing moves a man on behalf of others so surely as danger to himself. — It was wonderful of you to open your door like that. I mean, for me. I don’t know what to say. Why him? What would make them come for your son?—

The young man shifted abruptly, turning still more pointedly away from the apparition his mother had brought in among them.

— My son’s in the Youth — the street committee.—

The kind who burned government appointees’ houses, stoned buses, boycotted schools. And lived here — slowly he was making out of the dimness and his own shock what this habitation was. Its intimacy pressed around him, a mould in which his own dimensions were redefined. He took up space where the space allowed each resident must be scrupulously confined and observed. The space itself was divided in two by curtains which stretched across it, not quite drawn closed, so that he could see the double bed with a flounced green satin cover which filled one half. A table with pots and a spirit stove, a dresser with crockery, a sagging armchair into which the old man sank, a chromium-shiny radio cassette player, a girlie calendar, Good Shepherd Jesus, framed, with a gold tinsel halo, the droop of clothes hanging from nails, vague darkness of folded blankets — that was the second half. He saw now there were three children as well as the grown daughter and son; seven people lived here.

The woman had lit the spirit stove and she gave an order, in their language, to the girl. Holding the blanket in one hand and shuffling with her knees together in modesty, the girl fetched a cup and saucer from the dresser, wiped them with a rag, put a spoon of powdered milk in the cup and, chivvied again by her mother, a spoon of tea in a jug. Like a sleep-walker. No one spoke except the woman. But he felt their awareness of him: the old man bewildered as at a visitor he hadn’t been told to expect, the children in unblinking curiosity, the young man hostile, the girl — the girl wanting to sink through the earth that was the shack’s floor; as if he were the threat, and not the marauders whose gales of anger blew about from the road, rising and fading as a wind would gust against the tin walls. The old man suddenly got up and signalled him to take the armchair.

— Please — stay where you are, I don’t need—

The woman brought him the cup of tea, carrying a small tin of sugar. — No, no, sit, sit. You see what this place is like, the rain pours in, you see how we have to try and stuff around the tin with plastic, but we can still greet with a chair.—

While he drank the paraffin-tasting tea she stood above him admonishingly. — You must keep away from here.—

— I don’t usually come so far, it was just only this morning, and I was right on the other side of the main road, there was no one… it happened, I got in the way.—

She pinched her lips between her teeth and shook her head at foolishness. — What do you want to come near this place for.—

Don’t take any chances keep away from the main road— his wife, when he ran sometimes before going to bed at night, possessive, not wanting him to do anything that excluded her.

— I can rather go to my home there in Lebowa, but how can we go, he’s got a job in town, he’s the attendant at underground parking, you’ll see him there by the chain where the cars come in to go down under the building. He’s too old to stay here now alone.—

The baying from the road swerved away out of hearing. Morning sounds, of coughing, wailing babies, and the drumming of water on tin containers, were released. He stood up and put the cup down carefully on the table.

— Wait. — She turned and said something to the young man. He answered with the smouldering obstinacy of adolescence. She spoke once more, and he put his head out of the door. All held the exact position in which the narrow stream of morning sunlight found them; the boy slipped out and closed them into dimness behind him. The woman did not speak while he was away. Darkness danced with the after-vision of the boy’s profile against glare; the waiting was the first atmosphere shared with the one to whom refuge had been given. He could hear them breathing as he breathed.

The son came back surly and said nothing. His mother went up to challenge him face to face. And he answered in monosyllables she drew from him.

— It’s all right now. But you like to run, so run. — He felt she was teasing him, in the relief of tension. But she would not presume to laugh with a white man, her matronly dignity was remote as ever.

He shook hands with the old man, thanking him, thanking them all, awkwardly, effusively — no response, as he included the children, the son and daughter — hearing his own voice as if he were talking to himself.

He opened the door. With crossed arms, she contemplated him. — God bless you.—

The telling of it welled up in his mouth like saliva; he was on the right side, running home to tell what had happened to him. He swallowed and swallowed in urgency, unable to get there fast enough. Now and then his head tossed as he ran; in disbelief. All so quick. A good pace, quiet and even on the soft tarmac, not a soul in sight, and before you have the time to take breath — to prepare, to decide what to do — it happens. Suddenly, this was sensational. That’s how it will happen, always happens everywhere! Keep away. They came over, at him, not after him, no, but making him join them. At first he didn’t know it, but he was racing with them after blood, after the one who was to lie dying in the road. That’s what it really means to be caught up, not to know what you are doing, not to be able to stop, say no! — that awful unimagined state that has been with you all the time. And he had nothing to give the woman, the old man; when he ran, he kept on him only a few silver coins along with his house key in the minute pocket which, like the cushioned pump action of their soles, was a feature of his shoes. Could hardly tip her coins. But if he went back, another time, with say, a hundred rands, fifty rands, would he ever find the shack among so many? Should have asked her where she worked, obviously she must be a domestic or something like that, so that he could have rewarded her properly, found her at her place of employment. Where was it the husband held one of those chains you see before the ramp of a firm’s underground car park? Had she named the street? How shit-scared he must have been (he jeered) not to take in properly what the woman said! She probably saved his life; he felt the euphoria of survival. It lasted through the pacing of half a block. A car with men in golf caps, going to tee off early, passed him, and several joggers, just up, approached and went by with a comradely lift of the hand; he felt that his experience must blaze in his face if only they had known how to look, if only they had learnt.

But don’t exaggerate.

Had his life really been in danger? He could have been killed by a blow to get him out of the way, yes, that sledgehammer — it might have struck a glancing blow. The butcher’s knife, cleaver, whatever the horrible thing was with its sword-point and that woven bracelet like the pretty mats they make and sell on the streets, it could scalp you, open your throat with one swing. But they didn’t even seem to see him. They saw only the one they were after, and it wasn’t him. Under the rise and fall of his feet on the grassy suburban pavement blood drew its pattern on tarmac.

Who knew whether she was telling the truth when she said it was the police who sent them to make trouble?

He read the papers, for all he knew it could have been Inkatha murdering someone from the ANC, it could have been people from the street committees she said the boy belonged to, out to get a local councillor regarded as a government stooge, it could have been ANC people avenging themselves on a police informer. He didn’t know how to read the signs of their particular cause as someone like her would from the rags they had tied round their heads or the kind of weapons they’d improvised for themselves, the cries they chanted. He had to believe her, whatever she’d chosen to tell him. Whatever side she was on — god knows, did she know herself, shut in that hovel, trying to stay alive — she had opened her door and taken him in.

Why?

Why should she have?

God bless you.

Out of Christian caritas? Love — that variety? But he was not welcome in the hovel, she had kept the distaste, the resentment, the unease at his invasion at bay, but herself had little time for his foolish blundering. What do you want to come near this place for. He heard something else: Is there nowhere you think you can’t go, does even this rubbish dump belong to you if you need to come hiding here, saving your skin. And he had shamefully wanted to fling himself upon her, safe, safe, reassured, hidden from the sound and sight of blows and blood as he could be only by one who belonged to the people who produced the murderers and was not a murderer.

As he came level with the security cage of the electricity sub-station, the take-away, and then the garage and the houses prefiguring his own, the need to tell began to subside inside him with the slowing of his heartbeat. He heard himself describing his amazement, his shock, even (disarmingly honest confession) his shit-scaredness, enjoying the tears (dread of loss) in the eyes of his wife, recounting the humble goodness of the unknown woman who had put out her round butterscotch-coloured arm and pulled him from danger, heard himself describing the crowded deprivation of the shack where too few possessions were too many for it to hold, the bed curtained for some attempt at the altar of privacy; the piously sentimental conclusion of the blessing, as he was restored to come home for breakfast. The urge to tell buried itself where no one could get it out of him because he would never understand how to tell; how to get it all straight.

— A bit excessive, isn’t it? Exhausting yourself — His wife was half-reproachful, half-amused at the sight of shining runnels on his face and his mouth parted the better to breathe. But she was trailing her dressing-gown, barefoot, only just out of bed and she certainly had no idea how early he had left or how long he had been absent while the house slept. Over her cereal his daughter was murmuring to a paper doll in one of the imaginary exchanges of childhood, he could hear the boys racing about in the garden; each day without fingerprints, for them.

He drank a glass of juice, and another, of water. — I’ll eat later.—

— I should think so! Go and lie down for a while. Are you trying to give yourself a heart attack? What kind of marathon is this. How far have you been today, anyway?—

— I don’t keep track.—

— Yes, that’s evident, my darling! You don’t.—

In the bedroom the exercise bicycle, going nowhere.

In brokerage, her darling, resident at this address. He took off his running shoes and threw his shirt on the carpet. He stank of the same sweat as those he was caught up among within a pursuit he did not understand.

The unmade bed was blissful. Her lilac-patterned blue silk curtains were still drawn shut but the windows were open and the cloth undulated with a breeze that touched his moist breast-hair with a light hand. He closed his eyes. Some extremely faint, high-pitched, minute sound made timid entry at the edge of darkness; he rubbed his ear, but it did not cease. Longing to sleep, he tried to let the sound sink away into the tide of his blood, his breath. If he opened his eyes and was distracted by the impressions of the room — the dressing-table with the painted porcelain hand where her necklaces and ear-rings hung, the open wardrobe with his ties dangling thick on a rack, a red rose tripled in the angle of mirrors, his briefcase abandoned for the weekend on the chaise-longue, the exercise bicycle — he heard the sound only by straining to. But the moment he was in darkness it was there again: plaintive, feeble, finger-nail scratch of sound. He staggered up and went slowly about the room in search of the source like a blind man relying on one sense alone. It was behind a wall somewhere, penetrating the closed space of his head from some other closed space. A bird. A trapped bird. He narrowed the source; the cheeping came from a drain-pipe outside the window.

His bare feet slapping flat-footed with fatigue, he slumped back to the breakfast table. — There’s a bird trapped in the drain-pipe outside the bedroom.—

— So the kids told me.—

— Well let them take the ladder and get it out.—

— It must be a chick from the nest those mynahs built under the eaves. Fell into the gutter and then down the pipe, so it’s stuck — what can the boys do?—

— So what’s to be done about it?—

— Can’t exactly call the fire brigade. Poor little thing. Just wait for it to die.—

Back in the room, on the bed, he listened. Eyes closed. Every time the sound paused he had to wait for it to begin again. Die. It would not die. In another darkness the most insignificant of fragments of life cried out, kept crying out. He jumped from the bed and burst through the house, going after her, bellowing, his hands palsied with rage. — Get the bloody thing out, can’t you! Push up a pole, take the ladder, pull down the drain-pipe, for Christ’ sake!—

She stared at him, distancing herself from this exhibition.

— What do you expect of little boys? I won’t have them break their necks. Do it then! You do it. Do it if you can. You’re so athletic.—