Life Times: Stories 1952-2007

Parking Tax

Round the corner from the bank, a roofless two-sided enclosure on the pavement by sections usefully taken from a cardboard packing case bears a home-drawn sign: Shoe Soles. Within the demarcation a man of indeterminate age has his awl, his rags and pot of treacle-black potion, his small stack of thick plastic material curling up at the edges as if already treading the streets.

Between the supermarket and the intersection where taxi-buses swerve to answer the finger language of people signalling where they want to go, the client of a woman who braids hair with amplifying swathes of other people’s hair sits on an upturned fruit box filched from supermarket trash.

At the patch of ground somehow overlooked when the freeway rose at the intersection in the area where panel-beating workshops are the beauty salons for luxury cars, a painted shed has been provided and there are set out oranges, peanuts, cigarettes, jars of Vaseline, packets of condoms and mobile phone batteries.

In the entrance to the enclave between the pharmacy and the liquor store, where there is an ATM dispensing cash, someone has been granted shelter to set up her one-woman craft accommodated on her ample lap. She sits threading necklaces and beading badges, safety-pin backed, which display the red twist emblem of support for people living with HIV Aids.

These are enterprises of the Informal Sector, now a category in the new theory of the economic structure of the country, which declares that the price of the privilege of recognition is a share of the responsibility in reducing unemployment. The unemployed must rouse — not arise, in protest against their condition — and do something for themselves. The shoe repairer’s premises are a Small Business venture as defined within this initiative. The bank belongs to an international consortium which gives modest grants, get-started cash, to encourage such entrepreneurs. He was supplied with his awl, glue and plastic material. The hair artist, with a sum to purchase, as she must know where, from people who grow their hair as a crop. The man in his shed, its array spread on the ground before it, is aware from his own streetwise experience as a customer, what will sell and has had a one-off provision to begin his stock.

The men and women who sleep in the toilet block at the park nearby meant for people who walk their dogs and gays who cruise there, have made it disgustingly unusable, can’t be regarded as part of the Informal Sector. Many are illegal immigrants, refugees from the civil wars in neighbouring countries, they’re just an inflation of unemployment figures, uncounted, rivals for any work to be come upon.

There are other initiatives that if they may be minimally self-supporting don’t seem to qualify for the Informal Sector standard. There’s the man who attempts to sell greeting cards mostly for occasions already outdated, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, from a tray suspended round his neck. Perhaps people might buy them and paste an Easter message over the greetings? The cards may be charity dumping from the stationer’s. Anyway, he is at least in the class of economic activity above the one who has no set stand but hawks brooms made of dried grass-stalks up and down the street.

Beggars have no status whatsoever.

Responsibility, when you operate among others practising the same initiative, implies leadership if you mean to qualify for the collective challenge of the Sector’s recognition; that first indication that you’re going to be let in to the Formal Economy. Some time. But a leader must have an organisation, and here, coming up with a self-invented occupation, what high-ups call initiative, is the personal property of each one alone; to share it is to risk having it seized away from you. In place of leadership there can only be domination. And that’s a matter of discovering something which is inside you. Politicians have it, or they couldn’t win elections and recognise, at last, whether for their own purposes or something better, an Informal Sector.

The man who found the something in himself was one of those who wave in a car’s path to a vacant parking space, arms wing-wide, and then perform a repertoire of gestures, warnings, encouragements to the driver successfully to occupy it. Some driver-clients dub the process Parking Tax along with all the other taxes of the Formal Sector they occupy. It’s surely some sort of recognition above the patronage of a tip, when they give the Parking Tax man some coins as they drive away.

He is a little older and a little less black than other Parking Tax collectors fulfilling their inventive responsibilities. He probably came from a region of the country where the aboriginal inhabitants, wiped out by darker peoples descended upon them from the west of the African continent, and whites from Europe, have left ancient traces in the brew of DNA. The shopping street is in an old suburb, prosperous, not wealthy; not a mall in the suburbs where blacks of the new Formal Sector live in class solidarity with their white equals. The residents of the old suburb, some young, speak of their shopping street as the village.

He’s a rather small man with limbs and body appearing to be strung taut on wire rather than bone. His voice and movements spark, as that of men of his morphology often do for the lack of the stodgy physical superiority of others, whether Parking Tax brothers or members of the bank’s board. His manner of speaking, a personal mixture of the many languages of which one is his mother tongue, makes his communication easy, better than that of some others on the street. He’s never bothered to take part in the angry rivalry between his fellow Parking Tax collectors for the right to command this or that vehicle into this or that space, although a youngster among them would always know to step back if the two hailed at the same time the hesitancy of a driver seeking a bay. It was he who decided that this random situation was nonsense, no good to anyone. The others accepted his capability instinctively, although not proven in any way. It was he who organised them; each man to have his own pitch, reserved in this block or that, so many bays this side or that. Brothers, not street people.

There was some grumbling among themselves after the allocation had been made mutually, but no violence the way things used to be settled. If there was resentment against his taking for himself the pitch he did, no one would challenge him. Not just because of authority; he was so popular.

He chose what he saw had a number of advantages. The pitch begins at a corner, so there are vehicles coming both from the shopping street and from the connecting one. It is close to the supermarket — better than directly in front, where there is a loading space kept clear for delivery trucks and vans. His pitch is before the church, and not only do the Sunday devout come from the service with a conscience towards the less fortunate than themselves that makes them generous, the departing entourages of wedding ceremonies are even more so. The minister allows certain privileges to one of the children of the Lord, not a member of the congregation, who watches over their material possessions — their cars.

The man has a wife along with him at his pitch. She sits not on a fruit box but a small sturdy crate from the liquor store. There is no purpose in her being there. She doesn’t thread beads, sell cigarettes or plait hair, somehow incapacitated not by illness but by the natural haze of being at one level or another, drunk. No one objects to her presence, it is part of the privilege he took to himself. She has a kind of clientele of her own for her chaffing and laughter, mostly the homeless of the park, when her level is mild, which he tolerates, the Parking Tax brothers jeer at only privately, and even the white shoppers ignore as at a dinner party one didn’t embarrass a man whose wife was a known lush. The church’s compassion allows her, an invalid of sorts, to use the church lavatory in its grounds and her husband to draw water at the garden tap, which permission he has extended for himself to pull off his shirt and take a wash in hot weather. When her level is high and she sags from her seat, someone, usually a woman among her cronies, will support her a short way up the pavement where the grass has overgrown the paving, and she collapses there as if she’s put to bed. He takes no part. On the other hand, he isn’t seen to reproach her, beat her up. Simply keeps his busy professional front, as any corporate official must in the event of a problem with a woman. She lies, passing people taking suitable avoidance round her, until sobered enough to get herself up, smiling, and totter back to her crate.

Other Parking Tax men either pocket their dues silently or have obeisant gestures to go with thanks. He takes the right of starting up an exchange, based on his observation and memory of his clients. He’d given them his name (or rather a version of it, Lucas, because his African name was too complex) and while accepting they wouldn’t be likely to offer theirs, addresses them personally the way he assesses them. An elderly white man will be greeted as ‘Oupa’ while he locks his car doors behind him — ‘Old Papa’ in one of the whites’ languages — and a distinguished-looking woman with the widow’s companion, groomed dog on a lead, is met with the feminine equivalent, ‘Hi Ouma, so how’s it going today?’ Young white men are flattered with male bondage in tributes to their prowess: ‘Cool, my man! Sharp! You look you dressed for a big night this weekend.’ Every young woman, black or white, is indiscriminately ‘Sweetie’ — a driver as she hits the kerb or is nervous about reversing: ‘No sweat, Sweetie, I’m looking out for you.’ His evident sense of self makes any offence taken, outdated. The familiarity transposes what might have seemed charitable tolerance on these individuals’ part, to an obligation of recognition; equality, even of gender as well as race, simply assuming colloquial intimacy of usage in mutual possession.

He’s on particularly good terms — a calling-out exchange — with a young couple who happen to be white, like most of the shoppers. Of course he doesn’t know that the husband is a junior partner in an advertising agency, TV and print media, and the wife a lawyer in a legal aid centre for people who can’t afford paid representation in the courts, but he recognises the up-and-coming. Their car regularly bypasses other vacant bays to occupy one of their man’s, under his surveillance, as he would expect. Later he uplifts a palm coaxing encouragement as he or she approaches with a burden of shopping achieved, and saunters over his territory to help load the stuff, questioning, commiserating along with them the robbery cost of everything.

While talking one Saturday he was looking at the young woman’s shoes, gave the calculated observation: ‘Same size as hers’, jerked his head back to his wife and as if at a command, she waved to the couple. ‘Haven’t you got a pair for her you don’t like to wear?’ As naturally, in the winter: ‘She ought to have a better coat — you can see. Maybe you can spare.’ If the suggestion was forgotten or overlooked (he never accepted the offence that it was ignored), he gave a reminder: ‘What happened to the shoes [coat, sweater] you had for her?’

The wife has never been seen wearing any of these items that were duly supplied. The young lawyer was too respectful of the privacy everyone was entitled to, to enquire: ‘What happened to. .’ Everyone’s lives are unpredictable. The predicaments and unheard-of resorts turned to, as related to her at her legal aid desk. How unexpected (he lets her lie drunk on the grass) that now, a Saturday morning, the wife has her lap spread and he’s sitting there locked by her crossed arms, her drinking coterie prancing applause around them. The young couple come shopping are drawn in. Their man struggles up and puts an arm on the shoulder of each, sways them into laughter at him, with them: it’s not that they’re one with the people, the people are one with them.

They don’t have to remark upon it to one another, that would be unconscious admittance of what they were before: bleeding heart syndrome, believing they didn’t have any class, let alone race feelings of superiority. Now this freedom of spirit is coming in its validity, granted, from the most unlikely quarter, on the other side of the divides. Here was a man, Lucas, organising people who have no recognised place, told they’re Informal, a definition without function — except, of course, expected to create — whatever — for themselves. In his self-appointed domain of the shopping street, there is — something? — in him that brings coherence.

‘Without property, the principle of ownership?’ The lawyer knows the sources of the economy. ‘But isn’t that just it: they don’t have the incentives we have’ — she tries again.

‘Don’t have the access.’ That’s her advertising man’s response.

To herself, unspoken: They have found a way, and we haven’t.

She sometimes bumped into him along the shops — literally, he would be in what was bantering argument or his tutoring advice with a few of his Parking Tax men in the middle of the pavement, assumed that people would step round them in recognition of their responsibility for the order of the street. He might follow beside her into the supermarket or the liquor store as if he also just happened to be shopping, talking about the new extended shopping hours, row over liquor on sale on Sundays, the church kicking up a fuss, local gossip (did she hear, that old man with the sports car — yes — the red one — bashed into a police patrol car) and loading her shopping cart for her, pushing it before her to her car that was his charge. In his chatter there were threads of reasoning and disciplined logic that made her think — no, shamed her that he had no real occupation to draw on what were probably his capabilities and provide remuneration earned, not handouts in small change.

Over Christmas he was seen helping out at the liquor store, on the pavement loading boxes of party supplies into delivery vans. When they exchanged the usual greeting, she called, congratulatory, ‘You’re working here now?’ He grinned vociferously. After New Year he was back outside the church, where one of the residents of the park toilets had been standing in for him. He turned away his head as at an intrusion when she remarked, ‘You’re not at the bottle store?’ (Local jargon on the shopping street.)

It seemed he forgave her, and closed the subject. ‘They don’t know how to treat people.’

She knew what he meant. He’s not the proprietor’s ‘boy’. When she dashed to pick up food at the shops as an unwelcome distraction from her day’s absorbed involvement in gaining redress for people whose ignorance of rights complicated their need, she was conscious — again, he really ought to have some proper employment. All the prevarication of authorities, and the frightened sycophantic obfuscation of victims she met with at Legal Aid — in this street man there’s at last found something else; the only principle you can live by, now, another kind of respect. The something — can’t define, within his presumption, crudity, that she can trust. He lets his woman lie drunk on the pavement. As if he’d just step over her. But drink is her only occupation; he’s got nothing else to offer her but tolerance, her only freedom, to do what she’s resorted to. He accepts people’s laughter at this; it’s his share of the informal situation. That’s how one must recognise it.

Your Parking Tax pet, the young husband teases, over her concern. A colleague of his own trips from the Olympic level of drinking tolerated among the publicity fraternity, goes into rehab, loses his job and, incidentally, his wife.

One Saturday there is no encouraging beckon when she approaches a church bay and no saunter to help load the contents of her week’s provisions into the car. The man’s preoccupied with some other of his regular shoppers to whom he’s pointing out the problem of a flat tyre leaning their station wagon against the kerb.

Meanwhile a tenant of the toilets in the park belays her insistently, desolately, old, unshaven, dirty in worn cast-offs those people beg from the church. He doesn’t ask for money: ‘Please, please just buy me tin of sardines. Please.’ He sticks a forefinger down a toothless mouth. ‘Just one tin. Sardines.’ She has tuna in her trolley load. She’s fumbling in a carrier bag when he breaks away from his other regular clientele and thrusts between her and the imploring man. Ignoring her, he’s shouting at the bowed head, words are blows in a language she doesn’t know. Battered to less than a man, the other cringes, presses arms to his body, bends with knees locked, disowning himself. The ruthless debasement sets a shudder through her, the tin she’s found drops from her hand. He, more than a man, an elect, among the rulers of the world, swiftly bends to retrieve the tin and toss it back to the trolley.

‘He’s hungry, what are you doing!’

‘Hungry? — don’t give him anything. Nothing. He doesn’t eat it, he takes it to the park and sells it to get money to buy drink.’ A hand of dismissal gestured not as at anyone worth threatening, but chasing a dog out of the way. He takes a deep chest-raising breath, snorts to clear his head of the interruption, and smiles. He’s there to protect her from exploitation by the Informal Sector.

In her car driving away she sees she’s got it all wrong — there’s no new way. Nothing’s changed. He’s fitting himself for the Formal Sector. Some day.

Second Coming

Christians await the return that will raise the dead from the grave as He was raised. They rehearse this each Easter. Kafka records in his diaries ‘On Friday evening two angels accompany each pious man from the synagogue to his home; the master of the house stands while he greets them in the dining room.’ Every Friday night Seder an extra place is laid at table. Maybe the one the Jews are expecting is not an angel but the Messiah, the lost son. Muslims don’t anticipate the final physical presence of the Prophet Mohammed, they bless his name as if he were always among them.

He was clothed like any other man in the rough denim jeans that were the garb of men of any age in the era of the twenty-first millennium. No robes provided. And the return to the mortal state meant that the weals of nail-driven wounds came back, were there scarred under the shirt, and on the feet and hands. It’s of no account where he arrived. Apparently no one was about to claim a vision, now that there was a reality. Many over centuries had been sanctified for declaring a manifestation of him or his mother, celebrated in more recent times graphically, digitally, by all the successive technological means of disseminating announcement of miracles, or were exposed as fraudulent hysterical girls and adults in a dubious mental condition of religious exaltation. The sandals that he wore in the carpenter’s shop were the same as, himself ageless, he set out in now, the same as any young man might have been wearing if there were to have been any young men around. But no disciples appeared. No Romans manifest in their mutation as riot police with AK-47s, out to deal with suspicious immigrants of rebel reputation.

His sandalled feet took him along the ways he had to go, some of which had a surface hard and blue-black glinting, exploded, strange to the soles, and others receiving them sinking into familiar sand, the feel of the desert land come to be known as Holy, because of him. There were hulks of what must be some kind of chariot, unlike the ones the Romans used, but anyway too buckled and contorted to form a coherent image; a mass of sword-sharp glass shards, peeling colours, bent plates like some form of shielding, and hubs that must have held wheels as such objects have served since the power of the rolling circle was discovered, these in rounds of a black substance that had apparently disintegrated viscid, and set. He looked to someone to be regarding this — a consequence of what — as he did. But he was alone.

He found himself entering a city, recognisable as one because of the layout for human concourse that he had known, has existed in some design or another, in one era back behind another. Streets. Jerusalem. Streets; his way was barred by tumbles of rubble risen against great blocks of stone and brick conglomerates thrust about together. Lifted to his eyes he followed constructions that must have been the containments of this time he had come to in fulfilment of faith: fallen, half-fallen under some sort of quake (what evil power has challenged his Father’s Creation). As once there had been a flood on earth. Disaster. Cosmic; or some unthinkable disintegration, brought about by human acts, attrition beyond the wars they had sinned against their own kind?

The Romans had constructions, palaces, barracks, great walls, temples of the gods, tall premises of power. Here were premises evidently once so aspiring as to be lost in the sky. Fallen into the shaft of such a ruin, its empty stagger to heaven, there was something part never-covered grave pit, part ordure heap. A confusion cast without respect. Scraps of unrecognisable coded script: Gordon’s Dry, Dom Perignon: needles carrying no thread but pointing from small containers reduced to shapes of glass dust, from which, picked up, there is sensed a faint trace of something that was there, transporting essence, an agent of ecstasy not of the transports of the Faith. Where are the people to whom all this belongs, on whose possessions this disrespect was performed?

There are towers and steeples toppled, cast from what were his homes, each one his Father’s house. The cross on which his First Coming ended in agony — yes, reproduced in dirt-smeared trinket gold, in rusted iron, and the sacrilege of the cruciform hideously distorted, the arms twisted, wrenched at the ends into an emblem of atrocities. Wherever they were, the people who awaited him, what desecrated heritage had they left as the detritus of their years?

Someone must have survived to bear witness. Surely he would come upon some of his Father’s flock, hidden in the countryside.

There was the beginning of open spaces near the streets he had quit. No ruins but fallen icons flung supine or poking up, 7TH HOLE, 18TH HOLE; dead bushes, roots in the air, the condition of growth reversed, from under which he took a hard small object, a dimpled ball, it fits in his cupped palm on the scars. Dead trees, as beggar figures arrested against the line of sky, but then the fragile intricacy of beak-woven bird nests suggests there will be calls to be heard although there are no children playing whom he can tenderly summon.

The wind brings no cry, only stirs rasping branches in a movement he’s alert to as that of a bird; no bird hiding from him. But on a measured stretch of open land there are what must be gigantic birds of inconceivable size, outside his Father’s Creation, without bones, flesh and feathers, lying in the charred deformation of some self-consuming violent end, fires of hell. The broken skeletons of a kind of throne they evidently had inside them in place of the vital organs of birds and beasts lie within and spewed about them.

On and on. Where are fields of grain, terrace of vines?

The straps of the sandals curl worn, dragging between the toes, abrading the skin. No matter. There must be an encounter soon with the people of God who have waited so long. Everywhere animal and human bones — the feet stop, of their own volition, at the sight — the relics of life are indistinguishable except for the rise of hope that is faith, for here is a jaw that could only belong to one who could speak, and the wonder of a skull so magnificent it must testify to the continual resumption of life in that of a pachyderm mutated through the millennia, survived until — what? What catastrophe?

O Lord have you forsaken them? What have your people done to the beautiful earthly abode you gave them, that you have forsaken them?

Where are they, his Father’s people to whom He has sent his son, come at last to save from the death sentence of Time itself; to save them from themselves? Always there have been some survivors. Receiving manna in the form of a plague of locusts become sustenance, consumed as food. Men, women, children, animals somehow clinging to a rock on Ararat. The Flood. Water: yes, he must direct himself to the waters, the sea, fishermen use an element of his Father’s Creation other than earth, from which to take and sustain life. In this Coming as again a mortal, the paths he makes for himself, the mountain pass he climbs and descends are of a long duration, maybe more than two risings and fallings of the light and day ordained in the Beginning. Emptiness. Still no one, nothing walking, grazing, crawling, flying, scuttling from his footsteps, no one hearing his weary intake and release of breath, no face to meet with the sweat bleeding down his brow, the scars wakening under the sweat-soaked shirt. His thick-tongued thirst. The pools where he stumbled to quench it are so putrid they hold no reflected image of what bent to them and the swallows he took were vomited in rejection from his body. The pains the flesh is heir to that he took on for himself with human existence, the first Coming.

And here they are, the waters. The sea spread in peace down there. Certainly soon, the scent of it to pass a cool tongue over the sweat. The seas of the world, of Creation. The sandals slipped and slid taking him to fisherfolk, that steadfast flock who master the wild elements, land, wind and water as everyday circumstance; they would be there for him as they had been since he was among them and in what has been measured while awaiting him. Whatever had befallen, they would be there to begin again, with life netted from the sea.

There are no huts, no boats, no spread nets. Scatters and heaps of what once were these, half-buried by the smoothing hands of sand dunes, half-fumbled through by water along with bones of rotted men, sea creatures on a piled tideline.

He wades in, the sandals which have brought him so far from so long ago are hooked off his feet by the vast decay that clutches at him, thrusts at him. Breast heaves; no cleansing smell of salt to draw into it. Through the shallows, up to his waist, his armpits, and to rocks where mussel and sea urchin shells are fallen choking pools where fingerlings should find shelter from predators. The decomposed corpses of seals buffet against him. No salt scent but a suffocating charnelhouse stink of decay, putrescence.

This was where he achieved the miracle of loaves and fishes.

This water, the day of his Coming, has no properties of transfiguration.

He brings himself in desperate desolation even to consider the heresy (may he be forgiven), the possibilities of the theory which denies the Creation of human life formed divinely in the image of the Father; a belief that a fish struggled out of this element, the waters, to learn to breathe in another, and transform fins into legs that propelled, to walk on earth. But there is no life in the seas. No fish to come a second time, begin again evolution, become human, on one of the planets of the six-day Creation.

The sea is dead.