Noah's Ark (26 page)

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘Marking shitty student essays,’ Julie said. ‘How about you?’

‘Nothing,’ Ali said. ‘Julie, can I come and see you?’

‘What’s the catch?’ Julie said suspiciously. ‘You dump me for twenty years and then you want lodging rights. You’re not having a nervous breakdown, are you? Nurturing isn’t in my nature. I do enough of it with my parents. They have entered into a state of geriatric decline.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Ali said. ‘I’m not having a nervous breakdown; not to the best of my knowledge.’

‘Terminal illness?’ Julie said. ‘Tell me the catch.’

‘I have two young children. That’s all,’ Ali said. ‘My husband is working abroad right now.’

‘How old?’ Julie said.

‘He’s nearly sixty,’ Ali said.

‘Jesus, I mean the kids, honey-child,’ Julie said with some impatience.

‘Oh,’ Ali said. ‘They’re nearly nine and nearly five.’

‘So they’re eight and four,’ Julie said. ‘Okay. If they don’t put a ball through my French windows. Or break the china. They can come too. I really don’t see why not.’

Julie horowitz met ali and her two younger children at Jan Smuts Airport, where she materialised as an elegantly under-dressed and rather glossy middle-aged woman with an impressive sun-tan and discreetly hennaed, well-bobbed hair. She offered her cheek to Ali for a kiss, smelling of French perfume and breathing mouthwash.

‘I told you you’d have fewer wrinkles,’ she said. ‘And these are your gorgeous babies. Hello kids. Get your bags off the conveyor belt and look sharp, Ali-pie. Now is not the time to act like the Lady of Shalott. Are you as dreamy as ever?’ Ali laughed.

‘It’s good to see you,’ she said.

‘The car’s just outside,’ Julie said. ‘Come on.’

On route, from the wheel of the car Julie turned to the children.

‘How far can you lot swim?’ she said. Hattie blinked back at her, screwing up her eyes in the unfamiliar, un-English brightness.

‘Ten metres,’ she said. ‘Twenty-five with a float.’

‘Me too,’ Daniel said.

‘Liar!’ Hattie said. ‘He can only swim five.’

‘I meant five,’ Daniel said. ‘I forgot.’

‘
In armbands
,’ Hattie said ferociously. ‘He has to have armbands or he sinks.’

‘I forgot,’ Daniel said.

‘In my garden is something you won’t forget in a hurry,’ Julie said fiercely. ‘In my garden is an unfenced swimming pool.’ ‘Oh goody!’ Hattie said.

‘Oh goody, my foot,’ Julie said.

‘It’s the winter. You will both be kept tied to the jacaranda tree if you venture near it without a grown-up. Just once. Understood?’

‘Yes,’ Hattie said.

‘How about you, Daniel?’ Julie said. ‘Don’t you talk?’

‘Yes,’ Daniel said in a whisper from under Ali’s large straw hat.

‘In this town the major cause of infant death is drowning in suburban swimming pools,’Julie said. ‘I speak of white infants of course. Lucky little pinkoes like you. Black infants die most often of malnutrition. Harriet, why does your brother wear that hat? Is he hiding from me?’ Hattie giggled.

‘He pretends to be Huckleberry Finn,’ she volunteered eagerly. ‘He’s always talking to himself.’

‘He looks more like Mary Pickford,’ Julie said. As the youngest and dreamiest of three children herself, Ali identified strongly with Daniel. Yet her heart went out to Hattie who suffered so terribly at times from jealousy. Sibling displacement was an experience which neither she nor Daniel had ever had to live through. She thought now of a clapping rhyme which Hattie and Rebecca chanted in the kitchen some days, and hoped that it had no prophetic implication for the case in hand.

Susie had a brother

His name was Tiny Tim

She put him in the bath tub

To see if he could swim

He drank up all the water

He ate up all the soap

He tried to eat the bath plug

But it wouldn’t go down his throat.

It shocked her that Julie had not fenced her pool, or drained it for the winter.

‘Ali-pie,’ Julie said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘What do you mean by bringing your son here in bermuda shorts and a poove’s hat? It’s unpatriotic. Why don’t you get his hair cut?’ She drove with a masterful know-how through the complex erosion of highways where Johannesburg’s mining magnates had once held sway in graceful pilastered houses. ‘You must see many changes,’ she said sarcastically. ‘I mean with regard to concrete and steel. All our significant changes here have to do with concrete and steel. For the rest we jog along as always. One step backwards; one step forwards; two steps sideways. Funny place.’

‘Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?’ Ali asked gloomily. Julie, though Ali loved her, was proving a little abrasive.

‘Both,’ Julie said.

‘I’m told that my ex-husband has made money in concrete.’

‘Oh yes,’ Julie said. ‘He’s a pillar of society. And rather good-looking. Shapely, bald cranium, peppered with freckles. He gets interviewed on the television sometimes, sandwiched between the interminable nature programmes. Cranes heaving in the background and teams of blacks striding about in boiler suits. Would you like to meet him?’

‘Not particularly,’ said Ali. ‘He was never really my type. I think I’d rather watch the nature programmes.’

Julie laughed. ‘That’s what you say,’ she said. ‘After you’ve seen the umpteenth antelope leaping gracefully across the screen you’ll eat your words. The television here is afflicted by a glut of witless nature. That edifice presently impeding your sightlines, by the way, is the Rand Afrikaans University – speaking of changes as we were. The “Volk” are changing their class accoutrements, Ali, but not their voting habits.’

Time and distance had allowed Ali to forget until now that Julie, like many English-speaking South Africans, was capable, when referring to Afrikaaners, of sounding a bit like Goebbels on the Jews. ‘Time was when they were just a bunch of Dutch white
trash,’ Julie was saying. ‘Just a bunch of proles. They slept in their underclothes; they tapped wheels on the railways all week and revved their Harley-Davidsons at weekends. Nine barefoot, snot-nosed kids at every doorway scratching at flea-bites and veld-sores. Do you remember how we used to say an Afrikaaner was someone who was always tinkering with his brake-linings?’

‘Not really,’ Ali said.

‘Well these bloody jumped-up Boers in there have mechanics to fix their motor cars,’ Julie said. ‘They wear cuff-links; they play cricket. They also play the stock market.’ She nodded backwards with a lively venom towards the retreating edifice of the Rand Afrikaans University. ‘Afrikaners in Park Town,’ she said. ‘Jesus doesn’t it rankle! The “Volk” are into capitalism, Ali. They cleaned up cheap after Sharpeville and look at them sitting pretty now. Do you remember when “capitalism’ along with all the other “isms” was a Jewish conspiracy cooked up to undermine the moral fibre of the race? Even Cubism was suspect.’

‘You sound a wee bit like an inverted Nazi,’ Ali said. ‘Do you realise that?’

Julie laughed. ‘Nazi? I’m a Jew. But as to these buggers, one used to believe that the Final Solution lay in importing three million Harley-Davidsons. In that respect, times have got more complex. I have to collect my post on campus,’ she said. ‘We’ll have lunch in the student caff, if that’s okay with your children. It’s early days, however. What are we doing? Do you fancy a little urban anthropology before we nosh? Let’s make a pre-prandial foray into the Rosebank Shopping Centre. It will amuse your children.’

At the shopping centre where she parked the car Julie purposefully brushed aside a collection of maimed beggars and blind basket-sellers to guide her visitors into the air-conditioned opulence within. The place was a hymn to conspicuous consumption where Persian carpets spilled from shop doorways and gold jewellery twinkled abundantly from behind electronically guarded plate glass. At the Bendy Babes clothing boutique
Hattie pressed her nose to a window display of gold lame bikinis and diminutive disco-clobber for pre-pubertal females, and found that covetousness overcame her.

‘
Please
, Mummy,’ she said.
’Please
, let’s go in. It’s all so fantastic! Only to try on. Not to buy anything.’

‘Your father would have a fit,’ Ali said, feebly, whose own idea of pre-teen party dress was still the Liberty lawn smock worn with sash and ankle socks. Julie pushed open the door.

‘Let’s stir things up a bit,’ she said wickedly. ‘It sounds to me as though your father is in receipt of too much deference, what with him sixty and all. Come on, Harriet, I’ll treat you.’

‘Please,’ Ali said. ‘You oughtn’t to.’

‘I’m rich, remember,’ Julie said. ‘Don’t get your knickers twisted, sweet Ali-pie. You keep out of this.’

Ali and Daniel idled awkwardly in the air-conditioned arcade, until Hattie emerged ten minutes later, the radiant owner of a fake leopard-skin two-piece comprising footless tights and matching sloppy Joe.

‘Isn’t it hideous?’ Julie said amiably. ‘You could suppose that the entire stock had been made for child prostitutes.’

‘If you’re so rich,’ Ali said, ‘Why do you pass up maimed beggars in the streets?’

‘Oh
them
,’ Julie said. ‘To give alms is merely to prop the system. Furthermore, you don’t in your innocence suppose that they’re
freelance
beggars, do you? They’re just front-men, Ali. Behind every one of them lies a big-time crook who’s lining his coffers with the bulk of the proceeds.’

‘Rubbish,’ Ali said. ‘You’re just too jolly tight-fisted to make a few hand-outs to blind cripples. Confine your paranoia to rich Afrikaaners. Why worry about rich blacks?’

Julie laughed. She barged unrepentant through the same half-dozen limbless paralytics on her way out to the motor car and set off hell-bent upon a winding whistle-stop tour of the city which caused Daniel to throw up into the crown of the straw hat. In Yeoville Julie pointed with puzzling gratification to tyre marks
scorched into the tarmac, as evidence of proletarian Afrikaner youth – as yet untouched by cuff-links and the Rand Afrikaans University – who had executed wheelies in the meaner streets on motor bikes. Outside the Fontana Bakery in Hillbrow, the paving slabs moderately thick with off-beat amorous couples, Ali saw the first and only Rastafarian of her stay.

‘You see before you the five square yards in South Africa where amorous clutchings are proportionately gay and proportionately multi-racial,’ Julie said. ‘It is also probably the only five square yards in the country where whites are likely to mug blacks.’

‘How was Paris?’ Ali said. ‘Tell me something nice.’

‘Far away,’ Julie said. ‘Let’s not talk about it. I’m like whatshisname in
Great Expectations
. Jagger’s clerk. I won’t talk Weymouth in the courts of Chancery. If you want to stay sane in this place you cling to the cliches. “Europe’s okay, but it’s nice to be back in SA.” Ali-pie, the sun shines here, even in the winter. Not like in Paris. Nothing but drizzle and bloody dog-shit all over the streets. God, Ali, but it’s nice to see you again!’

In Fordsburg Julie drove with a perverse but holy anger past the empty, eyeless houses standing as testimony to the State’s recent removal of Asian shopkeepers.

‘Lunch, people,’ she said suddenly. ‘My stomach tells me it’s grub time. Let’s go and see what’s cooking.’

In the campus caff where they lined up for pastries and fruit juice the student population, predominantly white and glossy beyond Ali’s local rememberings, was scattered about among transglobal melamine-topped tables and Duralex glassware. A graceful young man, lounging like a young Athenian in a kitchen-boy suit, made startling elegant haute-camp of that badge of black subjection. The female rump before Ali in the queue was clad in pressed white baggies, sexily brand-labelled ‘Bang-Bang’. Ali found it pleasing, but not so Julie.

‘Prudery and titillation have always made fond bed-fellows,’ she said. ‘If some local factory were to brand-name their jeans
“Fuck-Fuck”, it would bring the place to a standstill. The double-entendre is precisely what makes it so acceptable.’

A significant minority of students clustered around the cash desk were wearing sweatshirts emblazened with computer printout portraits of Steve Biko.

‘But doesn’t it make you nervous?’ Ali said. ‘All this wearing of hearts on sleeves in what is generally considered to be a police state. All this standing up to be counted. What happens to them all when the tanks roll?’

‘When the tanks roll, I predict that most of this crew will be sitting behind desks in Houghton and getting on the ‘phone to their stockbrokers,’ Julie said viciously. ‘It’s a familiar process called mellowing. It happens to us all.’

‘Not all,’ Ali said. ‘It doesn’t happen to all. You may be right about some.’

‘Okay,’ Julie said, conceding the point as if it made no difference. ‘It happens to some.’

They sat at a table already partially occupied by two coiffed undergrad starlets in backless glass slippers who, having eaten their fill of yoghurt and apples, were now retouching their mouths in turn, with a shared lip-brush.

‘If my Mom’s bloody maid hasn’t ironed my bloody jeans for tomorrow’s demo, I’ll bloody kill her, no kidding!’ announced one of the starlets, shutting her compact with a commanding snap. She rose promptly to her feet, having offered the grist to Julie’s mill. But it did not signify, Ali thought, that a handful of the affluent young sowed their oats in the furrows of protest politics and moved on. There would always be those, like Thomas, who were steady and true. ‘I’ll sight you, Sandra,’ said the starlet. ‘I’ve got Psycho II at two. Then I’ve got Socio. and Soc. Anth.’

‘This is a mad place,’ Ali said. ‘Julie, why do you live here?’

‘Why not?’ Julie said. ‘The blacks live here, don’t they? Most of them have no choice. To up and leave as we did – that was hardly a heroic gesture. It was merely to demonstrate that us white folks owned not only this country but the whole world.’

‘Yes,’ Ali said. But she wanted to say simply that being back there had seemed to burn Julie up inside.

‘Speaking of our respective domicile,’ Julie said, ‘there is somebody else here right now from Blauwildebeestfontein like you. Did you know that? A literary genius in residence. He hangs out here in the caff with a clutch of indigenous admirers.’ In the far corner, following the direction of Julie’s indicating arm, Ali observed with little surprise that Mervyn Bobrow was holding court.