Frankie and Stankie (45 page)

With heart and hand I pledge you
As I load my gun again
You will never be forgotten
Nor the enemy forgiven
Hans Beimler,
Kamerad
.

Dinah deduces the probable tunes from Sam's runs of slightly off-beam notes and, having transposed them into standard tunes, she accompanies him with gusto.

Ladysmith is a good halfway house on the road between Durban and Johannesburg, so this is where they stop, en route, for a mixed grill. On the road, there are always transport cafés to be found attached to the filling stations. The next town along is called Harrismith. The towns are named after Sir Harry Smith, one-time governor of the Cape Colony and final scourge of the Xhosa. Plus his Spanish wife, Lady Smith, who is famous for importing Spanish melons. Dinah and Sam are taken with a poster that's pinned to the café wall, because it's adding a new dimension to the idea of the governor's marriage:

Meanwhile the filling-station lady has brought them a pot of tea.

‘In Ladysmith,' she says proudly, ‘you always get tea in a pot.'

Because Didi's out at work all day, Dinah spends the office hours playing hookey with Sam, who drives her to lunch at the Zoo Lake Restaurant, where the resident duck family is descended from a pair of English mallards presented by Princess Elizabeth, during her visit in 1947. Another day they go to lunch with one of Sam's old tutors. The one who is the last of Laski's sons. The tutor and his wife have a unisex look, in similar cardis and corduroys. The cardis are grey, but Dinah recalls them in sepia. The couple look like Sidney and Beatrice Webb. And Mrs Tutor is the sexual guidance counsellor at the school once attended by Jacinta-May
Fairweather. Though they are having several guests that day, the couple keep their dining table piled high with books. Both of them read throughout the lunch, stopping every now and again to fire questions at one of the guests. Among the guests is a Harvard graduate who is wearing a button-down collar. He's a man called James Dryden Richards III, to distinguish him from his grandfather and his father, who are James Dryden Richards I and James Dryden Richards II.

On the third day of playing hookey, Sam takes Dinah to his family home in Krugersdorp where his mother has laid out a lunch for them of salads and cold cuts. These are preceded by a thin consommé which is eaten with dumplings called
kneidlach
. And, because she's caught Sam swiping one of them from the kitchen before lunch begins, she's pointedly ladled twelve
kneidlach
into his bowl, while she and Dinah have three
kneidlach
each. So Sam is looking a little bit wrong-footed as he tries to wade through the mountain. Sam's mum is a sarcastic lady who can wrong-foot anyone in seconds, but she's best at wrong-footing Sam. She's nurturing her own wasted intellect in a precious crucible of unexpressed rage.

In the kitchen, Sam's mum keeps a jar of
schmalz
which is chicken fat for use instead of butter. But the
schmalz
isn't really chicken
schmalz
, because it's a kosher vegetarian alternative. On the jar there's a picture of a very happy chicken. And under the happy chicken, the label says, ‘Not even the chicken can tell the difference!!' Dinah finds herself pondering the slogan for quite some time, because the logic of it is eluding her. She deduces eventually that the chicken is happy because it can't tell the difference between the taste of the vegetable substitute and the taste of its own rendered body fat. It pairs up in her mind with Sally's dad's Overport butchery where in the window was a plaster model of a smiling pig in clothes. He was wearing a dark-blue striped butcher's apron and holding up a cleaver along with a string of plaster pork sausages.

In the evenings, in Didi's tiny bathroom, Dinah washes all Didi's socks. Then, after that, they do sex. Dinah remembers that, in the bedroom, there's a white painted cupboard she can see over Didi's shoulder. It says on the doors, in nice angular black writing, ‘This cupboard is Maggie's – to await collection.' Dinah decides she likes
the tall black down-stroke on the white painted surface. She also likes the name, Maggie. Then, next day, Sam arrives to drive her back to Durban. During this time they have another go at the words of Blake's ‘Jerusalem' and by the time they've, once again, stopped off in the Ladysmith café, Sam is quite pleased with his progress.

‘I think I've got the gist of it,' he says.

Sam has been politically active all through his student days in Johannesburg, so naturally quite a few of his friends are the people who go on to become the nation's struggle-royalty. Unless, that is, they become the nation's struggle-casualties first, as quite a few of them do. He's distributed Congress leaflets and sold Congress newspapers in downtown Johannesburg and in the white suburbs and in various black eating houses and bus shelters – newspapers that have to keep changing their names because they keep getting banned. And one of his important contributions to the movement has been to bulk-buy booze for the big shots. Since black persons are banned from buying alcohol, Sam will enter the bottle store on behalf of the ANC bigwigs and he'll buy whatever they need. They tell him to say that his ‘native boy' will come and collect the order on Saturday.

Now, with the new draconian bannings, Sam is full of misgivings about the ANC's capacity to convert itself into a feasible guerrilla movement. It's hard to be an underground, he thinks, with yesterday's above-ground leadership. A leadership which keeps on leeching away into jail or into exile. And, given the police's new special powers to arrest and detain indefinitely, he thinks the job of hunting people down might not be terribly difficult. Just haul in enough marginally active people and threaten them for long enough until one or two of them crack. All the state will need to do is arrest enough rank-and-file activists who can be leaned on and terrorised until they produce hypotheses which might hold a grain of accuracy. It's an open secret that the state is using torture. And, during his recent molar extraction, the dentist has happened to comment to Sam that his pain threshold is rather low.

So Sam has decided to call it a day. He's reached his cut-off point. And the move to Durban has made the perfect moment to withdraw. He's unacquainted with the local activist scene and he
won't need to get involved. But, naturally, there can be little harm in responding to the hand of friendship that's being offered by a Durban colleague who is a member of the Liberal Party, a colleague who, by coincidence, is living in the very same house that once belonged to Mrs Stewart's cousin. The cousin who grew all those cabbages with hearts, which are now no longer in evidence, because the colleague has got lots of pre-school children who have turned the garden into a sandpit. The colleague is struggling to make ends meet, so the family doesn't have a car. And it seems only reasonable, therefore, that he should sometimes ask to borrow the beetle.

It's shortly after these requests begin that Dinah and Sam start getting stopped in road blocks as they come in and out of Durban. Twice, the police pull them off the road and shine torches into the car. Then eventually they're waved on. A third time, the police get quite excited and talk very fast into walkie-talkies.

‘We've got the car,' they're saying in Afrikaans. ‘We've got the car. We've found it.'

Suddenly everything is off to forensic; all the airmail editions of the
New Statesman
and all the runs of Pogo. They've taken Dinah's hay-fever spray and her make-up bag with her Max Factor Pan-Stick and her Apple Blossom scent. But they're especially excited by the title of a doctoral thesis that Sam has on the back seat. It's about the Anti-Convict Agitation at the Cape in 1848, but the words convict and agitation are pressing several buttons. Yet normal life is still going on, because Maud is about to get married.

Maud is marrying the beautiful mathematician for whom Lavinia Steadman of Florence Powell Hall once, nightly, took out her curlers. But now, against all expectation, he's marrying Dinah's best friend. So Sam drives Dinah to Maud's flat one evening, in order that the girls can pin and cut and tack Maud's wedding clothes. Maud has bought a
Vogue
Paris Original pattern and several yards of brocade. The garment will be a knee-length ivory two-piece, with a low-cut fitted bodice that has fifteen self-covered buttons. Sam has decided to stay with the girls and he tells them funny stories all night as he watches the effects of their exotic female skills taking shape under his eyes. Maud's vet – Punch's vet – has volunteered both his house and his wife to host Maud's wedding reception. And the vet's wife has already lined up Jenny and Dinah
as her under-chefs. She's been putting them through the art of making canapés and dainty cocktail sandwiches. Dinah remembers that the vet's wife always refers to the sandwiches as sammickers. She says that the sammickers must be wrapped in clean damp muslin cloths. This is so that they won't dry out, because the plastic bag has not yet made it into general household use.

Once Maud and Dinah are finished for the evening, Sam drives Dinah back home. Then he returns to his flat, after midnight, where the two Special Branch policemen have been waiting for him all evening. Both have been drinking to pass the time and now they're reeking of brandy. Plus it's clear they're not best pleased.

‘We know you did it,' they're saying in loud voices to rouse the neighbours.

They've already been through the flat quite thoroughly, but they've found nothing there except the two electrified cats who've hissed and spat at them in terror. Wyatt Earp's gone into zigzag mode and he's lit out for the territory. After that he's never seen again. Jesse James is crackling with static, but he hangs on for the next two weeks. That's until the landlord comes to treat the place for termites. The message from Wyatt and Jesse is clear. They don't want to be kitchen cats.

‘We know you did it,' the Special Branch men are saying. ‘What we need is the details of your movements. And we want to know who was with you.'

Someone, that evening, has managed to blow up the offices of the local Afrikaner Nationalist newspaper. And of course they know Sam did it. And they don't like his time-wasting, bullshit story about two girls and a wedding dress. So they make him keep on telling his story until the dawn starts to break.

‘We'll be back,' they say.

This is a promise they like to keep and they particularly like to ring the doorbell very late at night. Sam is good at withholding information. He keeps calm and he's not a natural chatterbox. But right now, he's got not a clue in any case, because the ARM is so very new that nobody's heard of it. Not yet. The activists of the African Resistance Movement are mostly young and mostly inexperienced and they are members of the Liberal Party – though both their existence and their modus operandi come as news to the Party's leadership. Two of ARM's youthful saboteurs turn out to
have been Sam's undergraduates at Cape Town University. And one has panicked and has talked out everything – everything he knows about everyone who has been involved along with him. So the police can't quite believe their luck and they're high on it for weeks.

The young man in question was once Jenny's idolised next-door neighbour. But that was long ago in the Johannesburg house in which, throughout her early childhood, Jenny always chose her father's ties. For Jenny, the neighbour was a glamorous figure, a handsome, stylish boy and just a few years older. She remembers, once, how exciting it was when he and his gang conspired to peep while she and her ten-year-old birthday-party chums were changing their clothes after swimming. And Jenny – as always, brave little Jenny – having wrapped her towel about her person, marched briskly out of the changing room and confronted the boys over the wall.

‘Stop being so rude,' she said. ‘Us girls think you boys should go away. Go away!'

Then she turned her back on the boys and walked just as briskly away. She was greeted by hoots and howls of laughter because, as she'd realised, once it was too late, the towel wasn't adequate to cover the cleavage of her rump. And, even at ten, her curvy little buttocks were staunchly ball-bearing along.

Now the next-door neighbour has become the state's star witness. And it's not long afterwards that the car-borrowing colleague is rounded up as well. Some weeks well before this, Sam has put a stop to his intermittent borrowing of the beetle – though he's managed not to say why and he certainly hasn't told Dinah. But Sam has opened his boot one day to find it's got traces of white powder.

‘Oh shit,' he says. ‘Oh Christ.'

‘What?' Dinah says. ‘What's the matter?'

‘Never mind,' Sam says. But he's looking sort of white. ‘Who do we know who owns a vacuum cleaner?' he says.

When Sam next drives up to Johannesburg, he takes Dinah along, as usual, and he drops her off with Didi. And it's when she and Didi are doing sex that she notes, once again, the white painted cupboard with the bold black italic writing. It's still evident over Didi's shoulder. ‘This cupboard is Maggie's – to await collection.'

‘Who's Maggie?' Dinah says, but Didi is not best pleased. He abruptly aborts his sexual performance and gets up off the bed.

‘Shall I tell you what I hate about you?' he says. Then he begins to tell her. ‘We're in the middle of making love, all right? And what do you say to me? “Who's Maggie?” Who's
Maggie?!
Well, how the fuck should I know? It's just a cupboard, all right?'

‘Sorry,' Dinah says. ‘I like the writing, that's all. I think it looks nice – '

‘
Nice?
Didi says.
‘Nice?
!' By now he's aiming a kick at the cupboard. ‘And another thing –' he says.

Maggie is not his new girlfriend. The new girlfriend is called Veronica. It turns out that Lisa has known about Veronica, but she's thought it best not to tell. She thinks that Didi ought to be telling Dinah; and now, of course, he has. Lisa knows, because she and Veronica and Didi all play tennis together at the same club over weekends. Lisa, unlike her sister Dinah, has always been good at tennis. The Born Arm notwithstanding, she's got an effective and powerful serve. Plus she's never passed out in bright sunlight in the face of an oncoming ball. Dinah flees from Didi's flat and spends the night with her sister, where she shares Lisa's single bed. Then Dinah wakes after a couple of hours. She tiptoes to the bathroom and locks herself inside. This is so that she can cry without waking up her sister.