Double Negative (10 page)

I also remember the first time I heard Penny Levine's northern suburbs drawl in the mouth of a cashier at Pick n Pay. A black kugel! She must have been to a Model C school (Sabine had told me all about it). I kept her talking. The papers were full of snide letters about the black voices we were beginning to hear on radio and television, and here was a girl whose accent could not be colour-coded. She struck me as a time traveller, someone who had gone into the future to show what was possible. The future is a foreign country
too.

And then there were moments when the old South Africa reared its battered head. On a magazine shoot one day, I came face to face with the Great White
Hope.

When Kallie Knoetze fought Denton Ruddock at Loftus Versveld in 1978, my father and I were in the crowd. Boxing was not my dad's thing, but some big wall-to-wall buyer had given him the tickets and he felt he should go. That night Knoetze extended a winning streak by knocking the Englishman out in the third. I never thought I would see the man again, but here he was, up close, head to head with a Datsun bakkie in a scrapyard in Benrose.

The set-up was simple. Bakkie with crumpled bonnet facing right, boxer with broken nose facing left, boxer poking out a glove
–
hooks, uppercuts, let him try them all and we'll see what works
–
as if he's just stopped the bakkie in its tracks. The client was a body shop.
When your car takes a beating, let us knock it back into shape.
Knoetze himself had been panel-beaten by an amateur. It was fifteen years since he'd been in the ring, but when he made a fist he still looked like a fighter.

The shoot was sticky. I asked him what his best punch was and he said it was the knockout. But once I'd soft-soaped him a bit
–
mentioning the bout at Loftus did the trick
–
he relaxed and started performing for the camera. The photo is in my portfolio somewhere. A high point.

Scouting. It sounded like bob-a-job week for the unemployable, one step up from the dole, and in London of all places. The idea made me sweat. If only I had the qualities that set people at ease
–
poise, charm, the gift of the gab. I was getting my hair cut in Camden Town and trimming my accent myself (I have always been a good mimic), but I was clearly a foreigner, a South African
nogal
, and toting a camera. As it turned out, though, there was not much to it. I discovered an aspect of the useful truth Saul Auerbach had revealed to me: everyone wants to be in the pictures.

We would all like to think, I suppose, that the confined spaces of our domestic lives are roomy enough to frame some greater drama. In the age of webcams and reality TV, the thrill of turning on the telly to find Joanna Lumley drinking a G&T in your sitting room, let alone a complete stranger eating Shredded Wheat at your kitchen counter, might seem quaint, but the impulse hasn't changed. We have just learned to suspend our disbelief in more complicated ways. As much as we like to go behind the scenes, we still want to be taken in. Once the movie has dazzled us with its special effects, we want to see how it's done. We're just as happy to see how it's done
before
we're taken in. It makes the surrender to deception sweeter.

I was uncomfortable at first, poking around in people's private spaces, but that soon gave way to amazed curiosity. You cannot imagine the things I saw. Not the major oddities, those are imaginable
–
you know there are people who rebuild vintage motorcycles in their living rooms or cannot bear to throw away a newspaper
–
but the minor ones, the colour schemes that made me ill, the collections of commemorative thimbles, the hallucinatory menageries of soft animals. I took pictures just to prove I wasn't seeing things.

Little by little, I got the experience that should have been required of me as a qualification, and I got the lie of London too, in broad sweeps and primary colours. But the moods of places are subtle; they can change from one step to another, as Benjamin once pointed out, ‘as though one had unexpectedly cleared a low step on a flight of stairs' (I have the quote here on my notice board). I learned the basic English of the city, I followed the simple arguments of avenues and squares, especially when they were underlined by the river, but the things it was saying under its breath, the cryptic conversations of unfashionable neighbourhoods were always beyond
me.

If the air seemed full of static, the fault was probably mine. I couldn't go down the Tottenham Court Road or Baker Street or pass through Seven Dials or a hundred other places without feeling that I was in a story. I was reminded of my first glimpse of England as the plane descended towards Heathrow and I saw the neat patches of fields inked with roads and hedges, the muddy ponds, closer and closer as the plane dropped, until I could see chimney pots and roof slates like paint swatches in autumn shades, and then a tractor going down a lane and the farmer at the wheel, and I slipped into the pages of a
book.

The agency handling the Kallie Knoetze ad had offices in Bedfordview and I drove out there to show them the contact sheets. They could have sent a driver
–
you didn't email things in those days
–
but I was still relearning the map of the city and so I took them over myself. On my way home afterwards, I drove through Bez Valley. Against my better judgement, I went down Fourth Avenue again and stopped outside my house. The scene of the crime. The yellow walls were bilious in the afternoon light. There were two or three letters spindled in a wrought-iron curlicue on top of the gate. I collected the mail, climbed the steps and rang the
bell.

I thought I heard a chime deep inside the house but no one came. I was just reaching through the security gate, meaning to knock on the frosted pane in the door, when it opened.

‘Can I help
you?'

It always irks me when someone starts a conversation as if they're behind the counter in a
shop.

A small woman with a snail-shell of grey hair, more pewter than silver, lacquered and curled over a crunched nut of a face. Bespectacled. One of her eyes was made to look larger than the other by a thick lens. The big eye and the quizzical slant of the tortoiseshell frames made her appear unpleasantly surprised to see
me.

‘These are yours.' I thrust the letters through the bars and she took them without a word. She was dressed in black and wearing stockings without shoes. Good thing there was wall-to-wall on the floors, even if it was a dirty beige. In the pale dead ends of the stockings her toes looked like creatures suffocating.

I put on my nice open face. ‘I was passing …' And that was the last truthful thing I said. For some reason, I began to lie. ‘My name is Neville and I'm an historian.' Like a deadbeat at a support group. My mind ran on ahead. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it looped back, returning to ground we've already covered, sniffing for clues. ‘I'm writing a book.' I really cannot explain it. The reason I was on her doorstep
–
a visit to the neighbourhood years ago had made me curious about the house
–
would not have been hard to convey. It would have been simpler than the story I was now concocting, that I had already made up in some way and kept half-formed in the back of my mind, ready to be filled out and flourished for the occasion. ‘I'm writing a book about Rosco Dunn.'

When I said it, when the name staggered out from a neutral corner of my mind, I almost laughed and spoilt everything.

‘The boxer,' I added by way of explanation.

The big eye was a wanderer. The smaller one stayed focused on my face. I tried to change my expression to one of earnest enquiry.
An
historian? I did not even have a pen. The subject of my book had stumbled into my imagination a few days earlier and my stop at the agency had reminded me of him. When he arrived for the shoot, Kallie Knoetze was wearing a red satin robe with ‘Rosco Dunn' on the back of it and he wouldn't take it off. Our director had to call the casting agent and threaten to cancel the contract. By then she was on the verge of tears. ‘You're supposed to be Kallie Knoetze,' she said, ‘that's the whole point.'

‘Who the hell is Rosco Dunn?' I'd asked the make-up artist. ‘Someone he fought?' The name rang a
bell.

‘No, it's some character he played in a movie,' she said. ‘A contender. You see the parallel?'

The snail-headed woman was in the dark too. ‘What was the name again?' she said through the
gate.

‘Rosco Dunn. He used to live here. Well, not in this house, we can't be sure, but in this street. Do you mind if I take a look around? It would help my research.'

‘In my house?'

I'd been back in Johannesburg long enough to know how suspicious people were. They always thought you were up to something
–
which I was. I should have told the truth. Except that telling the truth can make you sound like a chancer. In any event, the lies were tripping off my tongue.

‘I'm trying to discover who he was, my subject, what he was like. You can tell a lot about a person from the place they grew
up.'

‘I suppose so. But the house has changed over the years. It won't help you much.'

‘The details aren't important, I'm after the shape of things, the general atmosphere. It would help me a lot, I assure you, and I'll just be a minute.'

There were waxy runnels from the corners of her eyes to the corners of her small, pinched mouth, as if tears had dribbled and dried between the two. The big eye was settling down. Once that came into play, I was finished.

‘People are very interested in Rosco Dunn,' I said, and again the name tickled me and I had to clench my jaw to stop from laughing. ‘Even overseas. Someone is thinking of making a movie.'

The magic word did not cause the gate to spring open. In fact, she began to fade back into the dark hallway. I had to restrain myself from grabbing her sleeve through the
bars.

‘Perhaps I should speak to the neighbours instead,' I said. ‘Do you know the Dittons?'

That reeled her in again. ‘Oh no, you're too late for that. They moved away years
ago.'

‘Then you're my only hope, Mrs …' I should have looked at the name on the letter.

‘Camilla.'

‘Camilla. Perhaps I'll take a picture of the outside, if you don't mind, Camilla. I've got my camera in the
car.'

My finger directed her lopsided gaze to the Mercedes on the other side of the street. Click. Her capitulation became audible in the sound of the latch.

‘I suppose it won't harm.' She pushed the gate open. ‘You'll have to excuse the mess. At my time of life, you don't expect visitors.'

When the door swung shut, the air shifted as if someone had clapped their hands together next to my ear. A lamp like an old ivory chessman stood on a table in the hall. Half-blind and blinking in the gloom, I followed her down the passage. The first two doors we passed stood ajar and the rooms appeared to be empty. The third door was closed. Looking back, she pressed a finger to her lips and said softly, ‘Dr Pinheiro.'

The passage opened into a room I took to be the lounge, although the word did not fit. It seemed like a stage set, half-built or perhaps half-struck, and so sparsely furnished I could not help making an inventory. Under the window, an oak table and a straight-backed chair; in a row along one wall, five matching chairs pushed together to form a pew; at each end, a side table with a marble top the size of a dinner plate; on one of the tables, a brass bell; from a plain wooden pelmet, a fall of red velvet curtains; centre stage, like an island in a sea of beige, a small round red carpet.

I stood on the island. Camilla turned to face me, with her hands pinching a waist in the dress and her stockinged feet splayed, intent and suspicious, like an invigilator in an exam who has to make sure there is no cheating. Yet there was something girlish about the widow's weeds, as if she had put on her granddaughter's school uniform.

‘I'll bet that was Rosco's room,' I said, looking towards the sealed door. His story was growing to fill the silence, sprouting branches and leaves on which I almost choked. I have never been a storyteller, but I found myself speaking in a new way, in a voice full of resonant echoes that seemed to come from a hollow space near me. ‘On winter nights, he would creep into the kitchen to sleep beside the stove. Better a blanket on the floor than a mattress shared with two roughneck brothers.'

I had read this story in a newspaper. Certain details came back
–
the cracked heels of the brothers, the cursives of ash on his calves in the morning
–
but not the name of the hero. Who could it be? A politician probably. We were fascinated by the new political leaders, the activists and exiles from humble homesteads and obscure postings who held our future in their hands. Their lives read like fictions, these men and women who had organized strikes and smuggled weapons, who had studied soldiering or economics or medicine in places like East Germany and Bulgaria, who had been in exile or in jail and were now cabinet ministers and directors-general.

Rosco Dunn. The lie was like a time-lapse film. As I spoke, the scrawny, ash-grey child matured into a portly middle-aged man with an identikit face that took its black-rimmed glasses from Joe Slovo and its cowboy moustache from Kallie Knoetze. Something about this face reminded me of Gerald Brookes and made my stomach churn.

I noticed the corner of a handkerchief sticking out of Camilla's cuff like the ear of a small animal hidden up her sleeve.

‘Would you like some tea?' she asked. And before I could refuse: ‘How do you take
it?'