The Pickup (3 page)

And then?

He gestured: Out.

Where would he go? She looked as if she were about to make suggestions; there are always solutions in the resources she comes from.

He leant to pour himself some more wine, as he had reached across for the sugar-bowl. He looked at her and slowly smiled.

But surely … ?

Still smiling, moving his head gently from side to side. There was a litany of the countries he had tried that would not let him in. I'm a drug dealer, a white-slave trader coming to take girls, I'll be a burden on the state, that's what they say, I'll steal someone's job, I'll take smaller pay than the local man.

And at this last, they could laugh a moment because that was exactly what he was doing.

It's terrible. Inhuman. Disgraceful.

No. Don't you see them round all the places you like to go, the café. Down there, crack you can buy like a box of matches, the street corner gangs who take your wallet, the women any man can buy—who do they work for? The ones from outside who've been let in. Do you think that's a good thing for your country.

But you … you're not one of them.

The law's the same for me. Like for them. Only they are more clever, they have more money—to pay. His long hand opened, the fingers unfolding before her, joint by joint.

There are gestures that decide people's lives: the hand-grasp, the kiss; this was the one, at the border, at immigration, that had no power over her life.

Surely something can be done. For him.

He folded the fingers back into a fist, dropped it to his knee. His attention retreated from the confidence between
them and escaped absently to the pile of CDs near him. They found they did share something: an enthusiasm for Salif Keita, Youssou N'Dour and Rhythm & Blues, and listened to her recordings on her system, of which he highly approved. You like to drive a second-hand car but you have first-class equipment for music.

It seemed both sensed at the same moment that it was time for him to leave. She took it for granted she would drive him home but he refused, he'd catch a combi ride.

Is that all right? Is it far? Where are you living?

He told her: there was a room behind the garage the owner let him have.

She looked in—didn't allow herself to ask herself why.

Looked in on the garage, to tell him that the car was going well. And it was about the time of his lunch break. Where else to go but, naturally, the EL-AY Café, join the friends. And soon this became almost every day: if she appeared without him, they asked, where's Abdu? They liked to have him among them, they knew one another too well, perhaps, and he was an element like a change in climate coming out of season, the waft of an unfamiliar temperature. He did not take much part in their unceasing talk but he listened, sometimes too attentively for their comfort.

—What happened to Brotherhood, I'd like to ask? Fat cats in the government. Company chairmen. In the bush they were ready to die for each other—no, no, that's true, grant it—now they're ready to drive their official Mercedes right past the Brother homeless here out on the street.—

—Did you see on the box last night—the one who was a battle commander at Cuito, a hero, he's joined an exclusive club for cigar connoisseurs … it's oysters and champagne instead of pap and goat meat.—

The elderly poet had closed his eyes and was quoting something nobody recognized as not his own work: —'
Too long a sacrifice
makes a stone of the heart.'—

No-one paid him attention.

—Doesn't make sense … why should people abandon what they've believed and fought for, what's got into them between then and now?—

What was he thinking, this intelligence dressed up as a grease-monkey—when he did have something to say it would puncture one of their opinions or trim one of their vociferous convictions. If he did speak, they listened:

—No chance to choose then. Nothing else. That porridge and for each one, the other. Now there is everything else. Here. To choose.—

—Hah! So Brotherhood is only the condition of suffering? Doesn't apply when you have choice, and the choice is the big cheque and the company car, the nice perks of Minister.—

—That is how it is. You have no choose—choice—or you have choice. Only two kinds. Of people.—

And they choose to laugh. —Abdu, what a cynic.—

—So come on David, what kind are you, in his categories—

—Well at the moment my choice is pitta with haloumi.—

—There's no free will in a capitalist economy. It's the bosses' will. That's what the man's really saying.— The political theorist among them is dismissive.

—You say that because you're black, it's old trade unionist stuff, my Bra, and meanwhile you're yearning to cop out and be the boss somewhere.—

The two grasp each other by the shoulder in mock conflict.

They all know one another's attitudes and views only too well. Attention turns to him, among them, again.

—You agree about the capitalist economy?—

—Where I come from—no capitalist economy, no socialist economy. Nothing. I learn about them at the university …—

And he's made them laugh, he laughs along with them, that's the way of the table, once you're accepted there.

—So what would you call it—what d'you mean ‘nothing'?—

He seems to search for something they'll think they understand, to satisfy them.

—Feudal.— He raises and lowers elbows on the table, looks to her, his sponsor here, to see if the word is the right one; to see if, by this glance, she will be ready to leave. —But they call themselves ministers, presidents, this and that.—

The friends watch the two make their way between other habitues masticating, drinking, crouched in a scrum of conversation, cigarette smoke rising as the ectoplasm of communication not attainable through the cellphones clasped to belt or ear. —Where did Julie pick him up?— A member of The Table who had been away when Julie caused a traffic jam had to be told: that garage in the next street, that's where.

Her companion had paused a moment on the terrace and she turned to see: a girl with sunglasses pushed back crowning her hair, thighs sprawled, stroking the Rasta locks of a young man passed out, drink or drugs, on her lap.

He walked away with a face closed in distaste. Her: Well?—was more tolerance than an enquiry of his mood.

People are disgusting, in that place.

She said, as if speaking for them: I'm sorry.

You're not there; I'm not there: to see. It's not a traffic tangle in the streets, hands going up in culpability, surrender, owing this, open to the public.

It's not the spectacle available late-night on adult TV.

She still joins the friends as usual at The Table to which she belongs—they are, after all, her elective siblings who have distanced themselves from the ways of the past, their families, whether these are black ones still living in the old ghettoes or white ones in The Suburbs. But her working hours are flexible and she's there at times when he's under one of the vehicles round the corner; he doesn't always come along with her to sit over coffee or the plonk that the EL-AY has available. The friends are not the kind to ask what's going on, that's part of their creed:
whatever you do, love, whatever happens, hits you, mate, Bra, that's all right with me.
People come and go among them; so long as they remain faithful among themselves: gathered at The Table.

There was that day when this was something surely he would realize for himself, the day he was with her when one of them told The Table he had just been diagnosed: AIDS.
Ralph. Same wealthy suburban provenance as Julie herself, clear yellow-grey eyes, shiny cheek-bones, adolescent sporting feats that had given him shoulders so muscular his shirts seem padded: they gazed at him and it was as if the old poet saw something they did not, on the unmarked forehead. The old man spoke to The Table in the groans of an oracle. —It's an ancestral curse.—

—For Chris' sake! What is this now—

There's a time and place for the old crazy's pronouncements. Murmurs: shut him up, shut him up. But when The Table poet has something to say he doesn't hear or heed anyone.

—We are descendants of the ape. The disease started with primates. Then hungry humans in the forests killed them and ate their flesh. So the curse comes down to us from the revenge of our primeval ancestors.—

The Buddhist convert stirs in agreement: meat-eaters, breakers of the code of respect for creature-life.

Ralph the victim suddenly bursts into laughter. No-one had dared even to smile encouragement at him; a mood of bravado takes The Table. What has befallen one of their own isn't going to be something they can't deal with alternatively to the revulsion and mawkish sympathy of the Establishment, after all. They will always have the solution—of the spirit, if not the cure.

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.