The Pickup

Chapter 4

It was taken for granted that any event or diversion in the lives of the friends would include the presence of the latest live-in preoccupation of one of their number: girl and her guy, gay and his gay — whatever combination currently had something going between them. This Abdu was at gigs with her which began in night clubs, so called, that were rooms in run-down houses of the quarter turned cheerfully into bars with ikon posters BOB MARLEY LIVES HUGH MASEKELA BRENDA FASSIE IS BACK stuck to the walls; some served pap and morogo spinach along with beer and whisky (high-priced), as the oysters and champagne of what the friends’ political guru termed unalienated values. All night the friends decamped from one to the other of these modest houses that had once been built by white small-fry speculators aspiring to become affluent, and paid off monthly by working-class whites with genteel aspirations, all fallen into dilapidation as gentility at this humbly snobbish level became part of lost white privilege. There were arguments about which joint was cool, with much lobbying from those friends who had a special connection with or weakness for one rather than another, because the woman who ran it was an incredible personality from West Africa, a singer had a voice that could take the roof off, some guy played the marimba like you never heard, or tonight there might be two bands jamming together. Some of the bars, opened one month and gone dark the next — Paris du Sud, Montmartre Mon Amour, a one-act of enterprise — were run by French-speaking Congolese, Senegalese, Cote d’lvoireans who perhaps also had disappeared under their own names, and were living as he did — but with more style. Maybe with the hand (not in self-exculpatory surrender, her palms thrown up) of those who could pay into the open-hand gesture he had demonstrated. On these intimate pub-crawls drugs were on sale and there could be some rowdy punch-ups that didn’t have anything to do with the friends, they might get a little high on drink or (certainly the poet, tagging along, and the Buddhist convert who had shaved her head) on what — marijuana — went under all the names, local and known to the varied clients, grass, dagga, pot, but they took care of one another and everyone had a good time. Except him, apparently, Julie’s find. Sometimes he would sit in the shadows, drink nothing; at others he would suddenly swallow alcohol with determination, as if set on a strange kind of reverse discipline. If the theorist among them had concerned himself with this, he would have found it a survival technique. Then Julie’s man would dance wildly with her, she laughing with amazement, welcoming this persona, excited, intrigued to know where the expertise, the energy came from — discotheques in the dust of that village — hardly! When he was a student at the university nobody had ever heard of, or working wherever in Europe — must have been then; the performance was marvellous but a touch retro, people danced like that ten years ago, fashions would take time to filter all the way to where he came from.

If this partying looked to come about during the week, he had a valid reason not to go along: the garage; the garage — lying under the belly of a vehicle, that was his justification, his reason-to-be, here, at all. He had to be at work at 7 a.m.; whatever it was the rest of them had as an occupation, a matter of earning bread, it seemed adaptable to their other, priority needs. Often the friends were pressing; there was the unspoken code — theirs against the sentimental mores of the world, friends are there for each other while lovers are transitory: the claims of friends come before lovers. D’you mind if I go? No enthusiasm in her request; probably the hope that there would be an objection.

He lies in the bed and waits for her, wakes for her. For her, the return is the best part of the night.

7 a.m. he’s at the garage in the grease-stiff disguise of his overalls. Or is it that when he climbs out of them, leg by leg, in the evening he steps from his only identity, here, into a disguise, the nobody Abdu — he cannot ask himself, such questions are luxuries he can’t afford. As for the garage room he was told he could use, just keep quiet about it, he has been warned — as if every disused storeroom, shed and lean-to in the quarter isn’t squatted in by somebody — he kept a few blankets and cardboard boxes there to suggest he still lived in it; but the complaisant proprietor knew differently. That young lady who hung about every day, coming in to talk to him low-voiced while he paused in his work, tools in hand, there to fetch him in her car every evening: she had class, you could see, never mind the kind of clothes all that crowd at the cafés wear, not all the whites had class around these streets, but she had. As a white father of daughters himself, it was a shame to see what she was doing with this fellow from God knows where, nothing against him, but still.

The proprietor took the opportunity one day when she came up to the office counter to ask whether the fellow was out — she hadn’t found him in the workshop and she had an urgent message for him.

His employer took the folded piece of paper. Looked at her.

— He’s bad news.—

The nerves in her hands began to twitch; a confusion that he should think he had the right to infer he knew who occupied her bed, anger at the assumption that she shared human standards in common with the lout, like-to-like, white-to-white; and dismay: something she might not know about the man she had taken into her life.

— Don’t get me wrong. For your own good, you’re a nice girl, a somebody, I can see. He’s not for you. He’s not really even allowed to be in the country. I give him a job, poor devil, I mean, God knows who it can happen to, and it’s the other kind, the real blacks who get what’s going nowadays.—

Her temper hit her like a lash. She was ready to attack him with the arrogance of the ‘somebody’ in her he recognized — but there intervened at least something she had learned of an alternative reality to her own: the indulgence might lose her lover his cover; this place where she had discovered him under a car.

— Please give him the message when he comes in. — As if the man behind the counter had not spoken.

He drew a snotty-harsh breath through his nostrils, rubbed a forefinger slowly up from the base of his nose, and turned away.