Double Negative (18 page)

‘I suppose you've met a lot of homeless souls.'

‘I have actually. I did a piece on the Homeless World Cup in Cape Town.'

‘Always wondered about that. Do they put the players up in hotels or must they take their chances at the city shelter?'

She rolled her
eyes.

‘No really, it's a heartless question but a fair one. It's about survival, which is your thing. Are the referees homeless
too?'

My old friend Sabine called me after her divorce. By then her educational resources agency had grown into a little corporation supplying services to the sector. Human resource development, information technology, knowledge management. I'd done some work for her back in the twentieth century when the deal was IT centres in schools
–
my moody shots of kids at the keyboard did wonders for the annual report
–
but we had not seen one another since. Now she was single again and looking for company.

On our first date, we went to Gatrile's in Sandown, her choice, her expense account. While she was sipping her sherry and I was chewing my tongue, Eddie Ledwaba stopped at our table to say hello. The poster boy of BEE, if the business pages can be believed. She remembered him from his trade union days, she told me afterwards, before the Cuban cigars and single malts. He still had a Lenin cap, but he only wore it on public holidays.

Over the mains (rack of lamb for me, sole for the CEO), Sabine told me that she and Bob Heartfield had parted company professionally and personally, in that order. Apparently he'd been caught bending the rules on certain tenders and been allowed to resign to keep his ass out of court. That was the American part of his anatomy she singled out. Soon afterwards, they decided to cut their losses and unbundle the marriage
too.

Sabine had a townhouse in Sunninghill and an office in Woodmead. It suited her, this unfinished edge of the city, defined not only by the obvious construction sites, bristling with cranes and scaffolding, but by the leavings of building materials dumped on pavements and empty lots, stacks of bricks, piles of boards and fascias under torn plastic sheets, prefab huts, heaps of rubble and river sand. It was hard to say whether things were half-built or partly demolished. Sex with Sabine had a provisional quality to it too, our bodies never quite fitted together. When I left her place in the early mornings and drove away through the clutter, I had my doubts about the merger.

The headquarters of her company were in an office park near the freeway. The suite was huge and determinedly neutral, with sisal matting on the floor and some sort of ecru canvas on the walls. ‘It's all about the finishes,' Sabine said to me when she gave me the guided tour. Besides the MD, no one had an office as such; people sat at workstations in odd corners, perched on the edges of their ergonomically designed chairs as if they had just paused for a moment to skim through a spreadsheet or rattle off an email. Sabine's office was so huge it made her enormous desk look small. The only other items in the room were a chair for visitors, in which I sat like a truant, and a chocolate-brown ceramic pot containing a tree covered with waxy leaves and tiny oranges. African contemporary, she said, under contract. In winter, the pot was replaced by an ivory urn and three long wands of pampas grass. The air conditioner hummed to itself. One blade in the wooden blind droned along sympathetically.

You would think that things were winding down here, being wound up. They must be on the point of moving: soon they would carry out the last few filing cabinets and switch off the lights. But the impression was mistaken. Sabine assured me that they were not going anywhere, they had been in their new premises for a year and they were settling in very nicely. The building was brilliant. You couldn't ask for better finishes at the price.

The atmosphere of places made to be abandoned clung like cigarette smoke in my clothes. You were not meant to grow attached to them, and it was scarcely possible because they offered no purchase. The almost-unpacked, never-lived-in look was the mark of success. Everyone was a fly-by-nighter.

Our love affair was not entirely unpleasant. My side of it was pure curiosity and for her it was a case of getting back into the market with a low-risk investment. We had a lot of fun. I thought she overdid the throaty laughter under the duvet, but before I could take offence, we went back to being friends, and then
not.

We turned off the N3 and drove back towards Sunninghill. I had not been in the area for years and it still seemed incomplete. Janie held her camera out of the window and took photos. My friends in the trade insist that photos are made rather than taken, but she was a taker. She took samples, clipping them out of the fabric of the unspooling world at arm's length and barely glancing at the screen to see what was there.

On Witkoppen Road, I pulled over, turned the volume down on Classic FM, which I'd been using to staunch the flow of talk, and opened the Map Studio. Sunninghill Extension 11, where Aurelia Mashilo lived, was not in the book
yet.

‘You need a Garmin,' Janie
said.

‘God no, I don't want to go around like a pigeon with a ring on my leg. I'll leave that to your intrepid explorers.'

‘But if you had GPS, you would never get lost.'

‘I know.'

I did have a new map of Gauteng, which I'd fetched from the AA in Park Meadows the day before. We unfolded it on the dash and found Sunninghill Extensions 9 and 10. With a bit of luck Extension 11 would be where it seemed to fit, like a puzzle piece, in one of the few patches of pale-green veld left on the edge of the suburb.

There's an art to folding the flat earth into a pocketbook: you must learn to read the curvature of a crease, the lie of the paper land. I should write a guide to the subject, I thought as I refolded the map, and she can put it on her blog with the survival
tips.

‘Why don't you call and get directions,' she
said.

‘Let's first see if we can find
it.'

It was townhouse territory, complex country. One walled city after another, separated by remnants of open veld. Some of the vacant plots were covered with tall grass; others had been burnt to blackened stubs, revealing huge molehills of rubble. A few men waiting on a corner for work barely glanced at the Charade, supposing that no building contractor would drive such a thing. As if to demonstrate their own ingenuity as builders, they had fashioned seats from the rubble, miniature stonehenges of bricks or stools of half-bricks and planks, which allowed them to swivel managerially without raising their elbows from their knees. Casual labour.

‘I've got software on my phone that lets me keep track of my friends,' she
said.

‘Why would you want to do that?'

‘For laughs, mainly, but it's also a security. I mean, if someone gets hijacked or whatever, you can find out where they are. I wouldn't like to get a puncture out here.'

Extension 11 was a small, exclusive addition to the suburb, two blocks of newly built mansions behind towering walls. We negotiated the boom and cruised between the sun-struck cliffs, looking for the number. Here and there, through gaps in the defences, we caught sight of grey modernist bunkers, late Tuscan villas, contemporary African homesteads with walls in shades of mud and ochre.

Leora's sister Jacqui, who is a landscape gardener, had found Aurelia Mashilo's place for me. The photo she'd emailed had not done it justice. The wall was a cubist assemblage of nut-brown plaster, corrugated-iron parallelograms and pale drystone panels, somewhere on the trade route between Mali and Malibu. The gate was made of stainless-steel quatrefoils. A swathe of broken stone, like a half-built Roman road, lay in the shadow of the wall in place of a garden. On either side of the gate was an alcove lined with pigeon-blue slate and grilled with iron bars. These niches seemed custom-made for a Venus de Milo from Makro or a David from the Builders Warehouse, but they were empty.

As if to make up for this lack, the letterbox, which was of particular interest to me, was in the form of a nymph holding a slotted cornucopia under her arm. Ceres, I thought, or Proserpine (now and then I am grateful for my beginner's year of Classics).

Aurelia buzzed us in, the shiny gate opened and I drove up on to a blood-red piazza. On that vast expanse of Corobrik, the Daihatsu felt smaller than a Cinquecento. The house behind the wall was an equally intriguing blend of pillars, pediments, stainless steel and layered stone. Aurelia was in the portico defying the elements in an earth-toned frock and silver sandals.

‘Sun Goddess,' Janie said. ‘How did she make her money again? I'll bet her husband gave it to
her.'

‘She earned a pile of it herself. Not that he's on the bones of his backside. She used to be in fashion, but now she devotes her time to charity and sits on a board or
two.'

‘And how did he get rich?'

‘The South African way. Mining.'

Actually, I had a soft spot for David Mashilo, the former Robben Islander known for his business savvy and his sports cars. I had also spent ten years against my will on a small, inhospitable island, although to my discredit I had not used the opportunity to get a
BCom.

I wasn't sure where to put the car. In the end, I just switched off the engine where we were and we walked over to the house. Aurelia was more beautiful than her photographs, and taller too, what with the hair extensions piled on her shapely head. Under her arm she had a small hairy dog, which she shifted over to the other hip to shake my hand. She was vivacious and charming. She wanted us to come in for tea and cake, and the cool marble entrance hall was inviting, but I said we were running late. ‘We'll lose the light.' How often have I said that? Even at noon, it happens. She was going to insist, I think, but changed her mind when she saw the digicam.

I got my camera bags and we walked down to the street.

Aurelia and the mail nymph. It was perfect. She wanted to leave the gate open, so that the house would be visible in the background; my explanations about the wall and the street, my half-truths about the public and the private, already presented in a string of emails and repeated now, made no sense to her. The sun blared from the stainless-steel panels and my eyes began to burn. When I was on the point of giving up, it occurred to me to mention that if the gate stayed open the Charade would be in the picture too, and then she relented. But once the gate had closed, she became anxious out in the street
–
on foot, as she put it. A security guard with a nightstick had wandered closer from a hut at the end of the block, but if anything he seemed to make her more nervous. The dog began to yap. She buzzed the house and spoke through the intercom. In a while a young man in a nacreous suit and pimpish winkle-pickers that Antoine would have died for, wearing a holstered pistol on his belt, came to stand guard while we worked. The security cameras perched like crows on the wall dropped their beaked faces to watch. She was making big eyes and sucking in her cheeks, some crazy technique for looking good on film. The woman had been a fashion model. I wondered how I could make her stop and still get a decent shot. Meanwhile, in my shady interior, which smells of old ice and bloody polystyrene, Mr Frosty was whispering, ‘Drop the dog, drop the
dog.'

‘Tell me about the survival tips.' We were driving back to Kensington.

‘Some of it's survival per se, with a capital S, and some of it's health and leisure. Search on Wellness.'

‘For instance?'

She bit her knuckle. ‘Okay. Stuff about cars. Not just the obvious like leaving your windows open a crack so they're harder to break in a smash-and-grab, everybody knows that by now, including the guys with the spark plugs. More conceptual things. Say you lose your car at Makro or Gold Reef City or whatever. If you press the remote the car will squeal and let you know where it is. It's like whistling for a dog. A friend of mine found his car like this in a blizzard once. He saw the lights flashing under a metre of snow.'

‘That's pretty impressive.'

‘It was in Sweden. Every society has its problems, even if it looks perfect from the outside.'

‘What else?'

‘Couple of tips from Oprah. Let's say someone locks you in the boot of a car, what do you do? You kick out a tail light, put your arm through the hole and wave. Hopefully there's someone following who understands that this is a crisis. Sometimes you have to be your own hero, quote unquote.'

‘It sounds heavy.'

‘We're living in dangerous times so, ja, it's a bit rough. But a lot of it is really useful too. I try to soften the impact by putting in some uplifting sidebars. For instance, true-life stories of survival against the odds. Have you heard of Little Milo Babić?'

‘No.'

‘He's the poster child of survival. During the siege of Sarajevo, his mom made him a survival kit in case something happened to her or they were separated. She knitted him a jersey with his name and address in the pattern, and he had a backpack with sandwiches and juice, a change of clothes and a space blanket, his favourite storybook and a miniature album of family photos. His picture got into the papers and he became known all over the world.'

‘Did he survive?'

‘Sure, he's not so little any more, he's all grown up and working as a butcher in Emmarentia. I want to do a piece on him some time. I've made contact.'

‘He must be full of tips.'

‘You know what's the best survival tip I've come across?'

‘No.'

‘Okay, listen up, this might save your life. Don't touch your eyes when you're at the mall. I'm serious. That's the best way to pick up an infection in a public place: take some bug off the escalator rail or the supermarket trolley handle on the tip of your finger and put it into your body via your eyeball. Smart move. The eye is the window of the immune system. What you need to do is keep your hands at your sides or in your pockets and as soon as you get home, give them a good wash. Never mind if your eyes start itching in the Pick n Pay, you can learn not to scratch.'