The Pickup Read online

  He, Abdu, does not join them; perhaps he didn’t quite understand this is not just a matter of this model of athletic good health being HIV positive, a gamble with the future, but of the disease—that curse the poet’s babbling about—already in possession.

  On the street, subdued, later she began to explain.

  I know, I heard. Your friends—they laugh at everything.

  Difficult to tell whether he was envying or accusing. She was silent.

  That’s their way.

  Yes, we don’t go in for lamentation.

  And after she had said it she saw that might be taken as a dismissal of what she supposed would be the reaction in his hidden life.

  She arrives at the garage about noon and he comes out to the waiting car he found for her. She drives to a park away from the quarter of the EL-AY Café and they walk round the lake and buy something from a mobile stall—hot dog for her and chips for him. She asks about his home, does he have photographs—when she makes assumptions, she doesn’t even have a photograph to go by, faces to learn from. His figure, a slim taut vertical as he comes out of the dank dimness of the place he works in, the lines of his back, in the sun, as he strolls to the water to give some left-overs to the ducks—he’s a cut-out from a background that she surely imagines only wrongly. Palm trees, camels, alleys hung with carpets and brass vessels. Dhows, those sea-bird ships manned by men to whom she can’t fit his face. No, he has no photographs.

  Nothing much to see. It’s a village like hundreds of others there, small shops where people make things, cook food, police station, school. The houses; small. A mosque, small. It’s very dry—dust, dusty. Sand.

  There are brothers and a brother-in-law, sisters older and younger than he—a big family, of course, he expects her to understand, in that part of the world. There’s one brother who’s away over the border at the oil fields. The sister-in-law and kids live with the family.

  The one—the uncle—with the backyard where you learned about cars?

  Oh it was in the village. Next to my father’s house.

  You must miss them, all so close, and here— She becomes him, as she walks to his rhythm, she has forgotten how she has removed definitively, removed herself from the family, such as it is, in The Suburbs. But she has no idea (if there’s not even a photograph) of what the people he could be missing might be like.

  I would bring my mother. Here. I wanted.

  All that he said. And— of course, again—that was impossible, he himself was not here: had disappeared under the name in which he was born to them.

  Perhaps of her I have a photo—my things, in the room.

  She had never seen the room. For her he was detached from it, as he was from that other place she had never seen, the village in that other country.

  When it rained one Saturday they did not go to the park but to her elected place—her cottage. She wore a raincoat; his shirt was soaked, clinging to his skin in the moments they ran from the car to the door. Running in the rain makes for laughter. Take it off, take it off, we’ll dry it in the kitchen. You can have one of mine, they’re unisex, you’ll see. His chest and back gleamed as if the rain had caressed him with oil, a chill shuddered under the muscles of his breast, and he found what it appeared was, for him, the presumption to ask something of her.

  Can I have a hot bath?

  His manner suddenly made her realize that she had never given a thought to how he managed in that room, that room behind the garage—there would be no bathroom?

  Go ahead. I’ll get you towels. And the shower’s great, if you’d like that.

  A shower’s what I get all the time—there’s an old thing in the garage and sometimes it works, sometimes no water comes. I’ll take the bath, if you don’t mind.

  Fill her up to the hilt! You’ll find foam stuff and herbal soap and whatnot. I’ll make coffee meanwhile.

  She heard him in there, the slap of water against the bath sides as his body displaced it, a little groan of pleasure as he wallowed, the gush of a tap turned on again, probably to top up with more hot water. His occasional presence in this dwelling-place moved further into the nature of its containment of herself. The pad became a home—at least for the Saturday afternoon.

  He came out barefoot, in his jeans, smiling, the towel neatly folded in his hands.

  Don’t bother about that.

  She approached to take it from him. It dropped and the hands, his and hers, held one another, instead. She moved her palms up his arms in happy recognition of his well-being; so simple. They embraced. All was as it should be. The living-room was also a bedroom, so no awkwardness in finding a place to make love. If they really had desired one another so much it had not evidenced itself before—no hand-holding or kisses, or intimate touching over clothes in titillation; probably due to him, some tradition or inhibition in him, foreign to her—she had been accustomed to playing at love-making since she was twelve years old, had had the usual quota of lovers common to the friends around their table, and took her contraceptive pill daily with her vitamins. Yet he must be equally experienced; they made love beautifully; she so roused and fulfilled that tears came with all that flooded her and she hoped he did not see them magnifying her open eyes.

  He did not spend the night, that weekend. When he had gone—took her car, she wanted that, he would bring it back in the morning—to fetch your shirt and give me mine, she said, head on one side—when he had gone she wandered about the room in the echoing of their presence together. She had made love so many times before. But she squatted at the bookshelves and found what she vaguely knew she was looking for. In an anthology of poetry were the lines that expressed what she was aware of in herself: Whoever embraces a woman is Adam. The woman is Eve. Everything happens for the first time…. Praise be the love wherein there is no possessor and no possessed, but both surrender…. Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal.

  He drove back to the locked and deserted garage, the room redolent of fuel and grease, in the calm and passing content that follows love-making as it does not, he recognizes, what her friends round The Table call a fuck. That’s the word that comes to him although there’s its equivalent in his own language. He knows that at least he gave complete satisfaction. He resists residue feelings of tenderness towards this girl. That temptation.

  Chapter 4

  It was taken for granted that any event or diversion in the lives of the friends would include the presence of the latest live-in preoccupation of one of their number: girl and her guy, gay and his gay—whatever combination currently had something going between them. This Abdu was at gigs with her which began in night clubs, so called, that were rooms in run-down houses of the quarter turned cheerfully into bars with ikon posters BOB MARLEY LIVES HUGH MASEKELA BRENDA FASSIE IS BACK stuck to the walls; some served pap and morogo spinach along with beer and whisky (high-priced), as the oysters and champagne of what the friends’ political guru termed unalienated values. All night the friends decamped from one to the other of these modest houses that had once been built by white small-fry speculators aspiring to become affluent, and paid off monthly by working-class whites with genteel aspirations, all fallen into dilapidation as gentility at this humbly snobbish level became part of lost white privilege. There were arguments about which joint was cool, with much lobbying from those friends who had a special connection with or weakness for one rather than another, because the woman who ran it was an incredible personality from West Africa, a singer had a voice that could take the roof off, some guy played the marimba like you never heard, or tonight there might be two bands jamming together. Some of the bars, opened one month and gone dark the next—Paris du Sud, Montmartre Mon Amour, a one-act of enterprise—were run by French-speaking Congolese, Senegalese, Cote d’lvoireans who perhaps also had disappeared under their own names, and were living as he did—but with more style. Maybe with the hand (not in self-exculpatory surrender, her palms thrown up) of those who could pay into the open-hand
gesture he had demonstrated. On these intimate pub-crawls drugs were on sale and there could be some rowdy punch-ups that didn’t have anything to do with the friends, they might get a little high on drink or (certainly the poet, tagging along, and the Buddhist convert who had shaved her head) on what—marijuana—went under all the names, local and known to the varied clients, grass, dagga, pot, but they took care of one another and everyone had a good time. Except him, apparently, Julie’s find. Sometimes he would sit in the shadows, drink nothing; at others he would suddenly swallow alcohol with determination, as if set on a strange kind of reverse discipline. If the theorist among them had concerned himself with this, he would have found it a survival technique. Then Julie’s man would dance wildly with her, she laughing with amazement, welcoming this persona, excited, intrigued to know where the expertise, the energy came from—discotheques in the dust of that village—hardly! When he was a student at the university nobody had ever heard of, or working wherever in Europe—must have been then; the performance was marvellous but a touch retro, people danced like that ten years ago, fashions would take time to filter all the way to where he came from.

  If this partying looked to come about during the week, he had a valid reason not to go along: the garage; the garage—lying under the belly of a vehicle, that was his justification, his reason-to-be, here, at all. He had to be at work at 7 a.m.; whatever it was the rest of them had as an occupation, a matter of earning bread, it seemed adaptable to their other, priority needs. Often the friends were pressing; there was the unspoken code—theirs against the sentimental mores of the world, friends are there for each other while lovers are transitory: the claims of friends come before lovers. D’you mind if I go? No enthusiasm in her request; probably the hope that there would be an objection.

  He lies in the bed and waits for her, wakes for her. For her, the return is the best part of the night.

  7 a.m. he’s at the garage in the grease-stiff disguise of his overalls. Or is it that when he climbs out of them, leg by leg, in the evening he steps from his only identity, here, into a disguise, the nobody Abdu—he cannot ask himself, such questions are luxuries he can’t afford. As for the garage room he was told he could use, just keep quiet about it, he has been warned—as if every disused storeroom, shed and lean-to in the quarter isn’t squatted in by somebody—he kept a few blankets and cardboard boxes there to suggest he still lived in it; but the complaisant proprietor knew differently. That young lady who hung about every day, coming in to talk to him low-voiced while he paused in his work, tools in hand, there to fetch him in her car every evening: she had class, you could see, never mind the kind of clothes all that crowd at the cafés wear, not all the whites had class around these streets, but she had. As a white father of daughters himself, it was a shame to see what she was doing with this fellow from God knows where, nothing against him, but still.

  The proprietor took the opportunity one day when she came up to the office counter to ask whether the fellow was out—she hadn’t found him in the workshop and she had an urgent message for him.

  His employer took the folded piece of paper. Looked at her.

  —He’s bad news.—

  The nerves in her hands began to twitch; a confusion that he should think he had the right to infer he knew who occupied her bed, anger at the assumption that she shared human standards in common with the lout, like-to-like, white-to-white; and dismay: something she might not know about the man she had taken into her life.

  —Don’t get me wrong. For your own good, you’re a nice girl, a somebody, I can see. He’s not for you. He’s not really even allowed to be in the country. I give him a job, poor devil, I mean, God knows who it can happen to, and it’s the other kind, the real blacks who get what’s going nowadays.—

  Her temper hit her like a lash. She was ready to attack him with the arrogance of the ‘somebody’ in her he recognized—but there intervened at least something she had learned of an alternative reality to her own: the indulgence might lose her lover his cover; this place where she had discovered him under a car.

  —Please give him the message when he comes in.— As if the man behind the counter had not spoken.

  He drew a snotty-harsh breath through his nostrils, rubbed a forefinger slowly up from the base of his nose, and turned away.

  Chapter 5

  There follows a space of time that she, and perhaps he, are going to return to in examination—now remembering this aspect of it, then that, for the past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight—all their lives.

  What gave it its particular character? He put on the mechanic’s overalls and went to the garage every day. She went much later to the tenth-floor suite of offices and occupied her custom-designed chair (gift of one of the clients) at a modular desk with a splendid view of the city given a foreground of computer, communication console, and subtropical pot plants supplied monthly on contract, or she met the current arrival of a pop group at the airport. They left their bed and parted knowing that at the end of each working day they would be back in it again, unknown to and unreachable by anything and anyone who claimed him. Apart during those days, at weekends they often drove into ‘the veld’, as he became accustomed to hear her calling the countryside, whether it was grassland or mountains. There they walked, lay watching the clouds, the swoop of birds, were amused, as lovers are, by the difference in their exchanged perceptions of what each took for granted. They were never far enough away not to have the surf of some highway they’d turned from, sounding under the sough of air and the passing calls of the birds that ignored them in contrast with the inescapable inclusion calling upon them, at The Table in her haunt, the EL-AY Café. She laid a slack hand on his smooth throat and marvelled, to him: To hear silence. We never do.

  To him this was not silence, this lullaby of distant traffic she took for it! Silence is desolation; the desert.

  Round the village?

  Everywhere. As soon as you walk some steps, some few yards from your house.

  Your house?

  Of course.

  And you used to go and play there, with your friends?

  No, no—not out there, never. In the street.

  What’d you play—football? What were the games, oh, when you weren’t learning about the guts of cars!

  Then they can laugh at the impostor mechanic, and she smooths the straight thickness of his moustache shining in the sun, and kisses follow. She brings along books as well as food to these hours when they double the disappearance of his identity, they disappear together, this time, in the veld, but the writers she favours are generally not those known to him from his courses in English at that university (in the desert? in a postcard oasis?—there are no photographs). He is a reader of newspapers; he buys, from the last street vendor as they leave the city, all the weekend papers, and they billow and crackle about them, sails in the wind, as they lie on an old groundsheet she keeps in the car. He reads the newspapers with an intense concentration and a discipline of disbelief as first principle in testing the facts. Sometimes he asks her for the meaning of an unfamiliar term or word. She surreptitiously watches him while he is unaware of her—it’s one of the tranquil pastimes of loving: he reads as if his life depends on what is there. The book she has been reading lies on her breasts, open face-down at a page where she has come upon a sentence, a statement, that seems to have been written for her long before she came into existence and came to this space in the time of her life. She has read it over again and again, so that it is written, read, on the air around her, around him and her, on the sky looking down upon them. ‘I decided to postpone our future as long as possible, leaving everything in its present state.’

  Sometimes there is something quite different, in the veld. An expedition, no less, of the EL-AY Table. Once a camping weekend, all the friends and the usual changing roster of hangers-on. She enjoyed herself immensely, that was obvious, everybody drank a lot of wine and beer a
nd exchanged stories of past weekends together that sent the battle for attention by excited voices, laughter, mock jeers resounding across the veld, a pack in full cry. He worked with practical matters, breaking wood and tending the fire, bringing water from the river; he had not been one of the company on those previous adventures, sleeping out on the beach in KwaZulu, being ordered off a bushveld farm by a sjambok-wielding farmer, and had no anecdotes to add to these. He was listening, or was not listening at all; absent in his own thoughts. Now and then in a moment to catch breath, they noticed, and felt him, they thought, studying them. Then she went over, torn between the familiar warmth of her place among the friends and the presence of her other, private intimacy, to draw him into that warmth by making some sort of show of the love affair, hanging on him, whispering in and nibbling at his ear. He restrained her gently, as if she were an over-affectionate pet. The friends were accustomed to sex-play among them on these weekend transportations from The Table at the EL-AY, no-one would have thought anything of it; it was his—his unfamiliar response that disquieted. There was talk: That relationship’s getting heavy, our girl’s really gone on that oriental prince of hers. Where was it she picked him up, again?

  Chapter 6

  To continue in their present state: his situation in itself, alone determined this. He is here, and he is not here. It’s within this condition of existence that they exist as lovers. It is a state of suspension from the pressures of necessity to plan the way others have to plan; look ahead. There is no future without an identity to claim it; or to be obligated to it. There are no caging norms. In its very precariousness the state is pure and free. The state the friends of the EL-AY Café table would like to attain by some means they are not sure of, can’t define, only argue over?

  So she is taken by surprise, off the perfect tightrope balance, when he suddenly speaks out of one of his silences.