The Pickup

Chapter 13

They go back — are back — at the EL-AY Café. Where else is there to go, for her? And for him, there never was anywhere, anyone.

She tells their story to her friends over and over, as this one and that joins The Table at different points in the recounting. They want all the details, it’s their way of showing concern; they repeat them, weighing them over, asking the same questions, a part-song. All around, the coming-and-going, the laughter, scraping of chairs, winding of tape-music, tossing back of hair, flamboyant greetings, murmurs, is unabated: The Table might just as well be having a birthday party.

— Told you before, my Brother, disappear. That’s the only way. Like the Mozambiquans, Congolese, Kenyans, what-not.—

— But he’d better make it somewhere else. Durban, Cape Town, clear out of here.—

— Absolutely not! This’s the only one big enough, it’s the labyrinth to get lost in.—

— Of course, else how do all these others get away with it? Tell me. Tripping over their carvings and schmuck on every pavement — you find them everywhere gabbling happily in their Swahili or French or whatever. So many of them no-one can get a hold. Sheer numbers. They can’t be caught.—

— It’s night in there, man. They’re black like me. This guy here, Abdu, he’s not one of them, his face and everything — it tells the story.—

— Schmuck — what’s that—

— Not some kind of dope, I can tell you — kitsch, if you’re able to recognize it when you see it.—

— I still think you had the wrong lawyer. You’re just too well-brought-up, Julie, Northern Suburbs clean-hands stuff, God-on-Sundays only sees a sparrow fall, girl, he doesn’t deliver thou-shalt-not to corporate fixings but he ordains it isn’t nice to use crooked lawyers. You can’t tell me something couldn’t be fixed. Christ, the top man down at Home Affairs here has just been relieved of his job, grounds of corruption …—

Julie is sounding the wood of The Table with spread fingers. — I’m not so innocent, not of what’s done where I come from or at Home Affairs. It’s just what you’ve suggested that’s the problem. When it comes to fixing. No fancy scruples. We’ve got it on good authority that everyone down there is scared stiff to open a hand, now. He’d only find himself arrested for offering bribes, in addition to everything else—

— Naa-arh … the higher you go the less chance you have of being reached. You can’t tell me that with the right connections …—

Thinking of her father, yes; there’s always been an undercurrent of keen awareness of her father’s money The Table concealed from Julie, in contrast with the lack of vintage Rovers in the background of this speaker and others among the friends. The exceptions — her fellow escapees from the Northern Suburbs — know that Nigel Ackroyd Summers would not approach a cabinet minister with whom he dines to ask that this illegal alien from a backward country should continue to sleep with his daughter. From one of them, a quick dismissal: —That’s just not on, Andy.—

— But you can’t tell me …—

— If all those hundreds — thousands — get away with it, there must be a solution. You have to ask around. Everywhere.—

Where is there?

She waits for answers that do not come; the friends have always huddled together with solutions for everything that happens to any one of them. The alternative solutions of alternative lives?

Even if it were only, in the life of the one sitting among them every day under life-sentence of AIDS, to transform the news from unbearable to the solace of laughter, that time.

— Disappear, my Brother. Like I say.—

Their old hanger-on, the poet, has been present, silent through repetitions of the story. He folds a sheet torn from his chap-book on which he’s just written something and pushes it into her hand.

Back at the cottage she comes upon a crackling in the shirt pocket over her left breast. She feels about the pocket everywhere, ask everywhere takes out a bit of paper, distrait, he is drinking water, one glass, two glasses, deep swallows over the sink, he gasps with the last and slowly shakes his head. She unfolds the paper and reads what is there.

‘This isn’t all but it’s the first part and it’s by someone called William Plomer you wouldn’t know of.

Let us go to another country

Not yours or mine

And start again.

To another country? Which?

One without fires, where fever

Lurks under leaves, and water

Is sold to those who thirst?

And carry dope or papers

In our shoes to save us starving?

Hope would be our passport,

The rest is understood

Just say the word.

(Sorry, don’t remember how it ends.)’

She has read it aloud to him, but it is meant for her.