The Wall

11

Happiness still hadn’t shaken off the previous night’s chaos. Her daughter had managed to eat something that disagreed with her, causing her mother to start loudly spouting ever new complaints about food poisoning. To top it off, the baby got riled up by all the turmoil and couldn’t stop sobbing. As for Happiness, she had felt increasingly desperate because the hours she needed to sleep were slipping away.

Happiness was tired. Much too tired to be watching these monitors. Nothing ever happened anyway. And it was so hot.

In theory, her duties were quite easy. Six monitors for six gated communities. She was sitting in a small room behind the office out of which the management and sales activities for all six neighborhoods were run. There were varying numbers of cameras in each of these areas. Usually eight, but sometimes ten or twelve. And the pictures changed at ten-second intervals. If something happened, she could select a particular camera. A simple keyboard combination. She could also simultaneously watch four cameras on a single monitor. However, when that occurred, she couldn’t observe what was happening on the other monitors. She only did that if something really wasn’t right somewhere. Last week, she had split one of the computer’s monitors when she noticed that a car had been driving up and down the streets in a gated community in Beacon Bay. She couldn’t see who was sitting in the car, but she had figured out that it was a Golf. A new model. Golfs were popular among some tsotsis. After a while, the car had driven back to the entrance. The gate had opened automatically, and the episode had ended. Happiness had called Warren, the head of security for the company that managed the gated communities. He had printed out a picture of the car and then disappeared. Happiness didn’t know what he did with it.

“You should have told me about that car earlier,” Warren had said the following day.

The tabletop fan blew a breeze across her face, but Happiness couldn’t shake off the heat in this windowless space. And she had just caught herself dozing off again. She was a little worried about the boy stalking around The Pines. She couldn’t place him. He seemed slightly scruffy, and he was looking at the houses in a way she couldn’t understand. Warren was out somewhere, so she couldn’t ask him.

She had three options.

She could notify someone in The Pines. There was a caretaker there, a man who ran around in shorts even in the winter.

Warren had said, “Call him if there are any minor problems.”

“What counts as minor problems?” she’d asked.

“If someone’s hanging around, or something looks funny.”

For bigger problems, she was supposed to notify Central Alert. That was the company she worked for. The only reason she was sitting in this room was because the company for which Warren was head of security had a contract with Central Alert.

“What are bigger problems?” Happiness had asked.

“When you see a tsotsi,” Warren had said. “Or when you see someone who doesn’t belong there.”

But who didn’t belong there? Warren’s answer to this question would be different than hers, that much she knew. And the young van Lange, her Central Alert supervisor, had instructed her to not notify their people about every little thing. “If you think the caretaker can take care of the problem, give him a call.”

And then, there were the real problems. In those cases, she should call the police. When an actual crime took place, like if she saw someone break into a house. When that happened, though, there were two other problems. If someone actually broke in somewhere, then that meant she had overlooked something earlier. And most of the time, the police didn’t show up anyway.

What should she do about the boy? Happiness was so tired. And it was only a little after one. Still almost five hours until the end of her shift.