The Pickup (6 page)

With laughter and clinking of glasses the talk is of Australia, in place of Cisco Systems, gold or India. The women show appropriate interest in the house the emigrants will choose, suburban or out-of-town, lovely climate anyway. The man explains that he has a complete set-up ready—excellent Australian staff chosen by himself on preparatory visits. —You'll perhaps not be surprised to hear of the exception, my old driver—Festus, remember? Yes—his wife died recently, he wants to try a new life, he says, so he's being relocated with anything else we feel inclined to pack up.—

The young foreigner (coloured, or whatever he is) moves from Nigel Summers' daughter's protection into the general exchange.

—Was it easy to get entry?—

Nobody must laugh at this: the idea that a man of such
means and standing would not be an asset to any country. The executive director of a world-wide website network, kindly, only smiles, gives a brief assuring movement, the chin and lower lip pursing, at the naivety.

The foreigner looks back from a no-entry cave of black eyes: —I don't mean you. I mean your driver.—

—Oh I left that to my colleague here, Hamilton—Mr Motsamai. Hamilton's a wizard, he knows exactly what one has to get together, whom to approach, documents and so forth. Bureaucratic stuff. It's been tremendously useful, in our operation here, to have a top lawyer on the Management Board, a bonus quite apart from his invaluable financial nous, of course—

The voice was raised for the benefit of the compliment to reach the ears of Mr Motsamai but he was too centred in other animated company to hear it above his own bass. Glances turned to place the one so favoured and a woman pleased to be in the know offered an aside. —That's the black lawyer who saved the son of the Summers' great friends. Such nice people, awful affair. Got him off with only seven years for that ghastly murder a few years ago—the son shot the homosexual who seduced his girl, and he'd had an affair with him, himself. Could have been life in prison.—

‘Relocate' they say. The couple are ‘relocating'.

If one were to overhear this—do they know what they're talking about?

When in doubt go to the dictionary.

‘Locate: to discover the exact locality of a person or thing; to enter, take possession of.'

To discover the exact location of a ‘thing' is a simple matter of factual research. To discover the exact location of a person: where to locate the self?

To take possession of—a land-claim, a gold mine, etc.? The land-claim, the gold mine—the clever lawyer who's just been praised can tell how to go about taking possession of the land, the gold mine, (if it's worth possessing at all according to present inside information) may be gained by a take-over or merger. To discover and take over possession of oneself, is that secretly the meaning of ‘relocation' as it is shaped by the tongue and lips in substitution for 'immigration'?

‘Relocate' they're saying. It's the current euphemism for pulling up anchor and going somewhere else, either perforce or because of the constrictions of poverty or politics, or by choice of ambition and belief that there's an even more privileged life, safe from the pitchforks and AK-47s of the rebellious poor and the handguns of the criminals. It's not a matter of unpacking furniture in new premises. Some of the dictionary definitions of the root word ‘locate' give away the inexpressible yearning that cannot be explained by ambition, privilege, or even fear of others. Promised land, an Australia, if you like.

A farewell is also a celebration of immigration as a human solution. No-one here brings to mind it's not the first time. Giles Yelverton. Hein Straus. Mario Marini. Debby and Glen Horwitz. Top (nickname) Ivanovic. Sandy and Alison McLeod. Owen Williams. Danielle (née Le Sueur) and Nigel Ackroyd Summers and his daughter Julie. Generations have buried this category of theirs along with the grandfathers but all these are immigrants by descent. Only the lawyer Motsamai, among them, is the exception. He was here; he is here; a possession of self. Perhaps. Lawyer with the triumph of famous cases behind him, turned financier, what he has become must be what he wishes to be; his name remains in unchanged identity with where his life began and continues to be lived.

The fêted couple are about to be immigrants. Sitting
among the gathering Julie is seeing the couple as those—her father's kind of people—who may move about the world welcome everywhere, as they please, while someone has to live disguised as a grease-monkey without a name.

Her father appeared as they walked towards her car. They already had said their obligatory goodbyes. He halted her a moment with a staying gesture barely touching her shoulder. She turned to meet a face restored from childhood. —You're all right?— The voice for her alone. And in the moment that would instantly seem as if it never happened, there was in her returning gaze, for him only, the understanding that she was asking the same: about him, her father, that there was between them this question to be shared, to be asked of him, his life, too.

That Sunday ended. There never need be another; he should be convinced, now. Her mother lives in California; that introduction, if he thought it necessary, would take place sometime if she accompanied her husband to his casino investments back in this country. That would not add much; all there was to tell him, confess, had been shown before him today. In the car he had found for her, going home to her cottage, they were silent, needing rest. She was grateful he said nothing about the experience; not yet. She placed her palm on his thigh and he took a hand off the wheel and touched hers lightly, returning his hand to the business of driving.

In her place—their place—she stood a moment almost giddily and looked at him, an assertion of her reality, before her. He was glancing about the small all-purpose room with its three chairs, table to eat off, bed to receive them, unmade from the morning, as if looking for somewhere to place himself.

Absolutely stuffed with all that food. What about you? Something to drink? Tea?

He lifted a hand—no, no. He let himself down spreadeagled
on his back, on the bed. She followed his eyes round the room to discover what he was planning to say; then she went over and sat on the bed. And twisted her body to lean and kiss him, on the forehead and then, tentatively, on the mouth. She was at once heated, like a gross blush all over her body and face, by a fierce desire, which she was at pains to conceal, folding away her hands that urged to thrust down over the flat dark-haired belly that she knew under his pants.

Interesting people there. They make a success.

Those were the words he was looking for round the room. The wonderful desire drained from her instantly.

They'd stamp on one another's heads to make it.

The document must have been lying on somebody's desk, that weekend. Or maybe in the post office from where whatever mail he received was to be delivered in the name that was supposed to be his, care of the garage that was supposed to be his only address. She was to visualize this closed and deserted Sunday post office, uselessly, afterwards, a daymare in sunlight, a conjuring up of foreboding in the dark bed at night. To dignify the piece of paper as a ‘document' was more than the brusque demand it made in the guise of citations from this law and that, this paragraph of that section, as promulgated on one date or another. It had come to the notice of the Department of Home Affairs that (his real name) was living at the above address under the alias (the name the grease-monkey answered to) in contravention of the termination of his permit of such-and-such a date to reside in the Republic. This was a criminal offence (paragraph, section of law) and he was therefore duly informed that he must depart within 14 days or face charges and deportation to his country of origin.

These letters that come unstamped, Official Business. She has never received one; her income tax papers, a citizen's routine
fiscal matters, go to her family's accountants. He came to the cottage still in his dirty overalls, carrying this—thing. The envelope had been raggedly torn—he knows what to expect from such missives. He had read the news and come just as he was from among the eviscerated cars and the amplified pop music in the garage. —Here it is.

She had almost forgotten; the months that had passed since she bought the car he found for her, his coming home to her every evening, the night club jaunts with the friends from The Table, the weekends away in the veld, lying side by side in his silence, the excitement and following peace of love-making, nights and early mornings—these had lulled her. These (what were those lines that came back to her) postponed the future … leaving everything in its present state.

She sat suddenly on their bed to read the thing over again. He stood in the room as if he were already the stranger ejected from it. And so she wept and flung herself at him and he had no reassurance for her in the arms that came about her. They were unsteady on their feet. She struggled free and drew up the piece of paper. She took him by the hand for them to sit and read it over again, together. But he sat beside her, lifted his shoulders and let them fall, did not follow the lines with her. He knows the form, the content, the phraseology; it is the form of the world's communication with him. She looks for loopholes, for double meanings that might be deciphered to advantage, that he knows are all stopped up, are all unambiguous. Out. Get out. Out.

Then she became angry. Who told them? How did they find out? After how long? How long? Two years—

Two years and some months.

Who? But who would do it, what for?

Anyone. Someone who wants my job, maybe. Yes. Why not.

Why not! What harm do you do anybody, what did you take away from anybody, that lousy job and a shed to live in!

Julie. Somebody who's here in his own place.

And now his eyes were penetrating as searchlights seeking her out, his lips were drawn back in violent pain in place of that beautiful curved smile. Even this I'm wearing, this dirty … even whatyoucallit, a shed, a corner in the street to sleep in, that's his, not mine. That's how it is. Whatever I have is his.

A gust of what was unknown between them blew them apart. In distress she wanted somehow to reach and grapple with him as he was borne away, as she was borne away.

Why do you take it like this! What are you going to do about it! There must be something—protest, apply—this Home Affairs place, can't you go to them right away, tomorrow morning—how can you just—

Leave me, leave me:
he knows that is what this girl is really saying; to her—of course—expulsion means she loses her lover, this bed will be empty, at least until—she's free, secure and free, she finds another lover. To calm her—and himself: I go there. Nothing will be done. They'll look up the other paper from nearly one year and a half. They know I was supposed to get out then.

So you knew this would happen. Even after so long.

I knew, yes. I thought perhaps, they lost the paper, maybe they have so many papers of people like me, they could forget me. That was my chance. That's how it is. I could go there to them, but what for. It will be better if I do nothing, I didn't get the letter, I'm not at the garage any more, I'm somewhere …

Well they don't know you're here with me. You don't live at that address, that's something. I think they'll know.

That horrible man at the garage!
He's bad news, he's not for you, he's not even allowed to be in the country.
What about your job? Even if no records are kept… you'd have to disappear from that as well …

Disappear (she has given him the word he needs), yes.

Again. Again! And again another name!

He sees her turning her head this way and that, in the trap. That's how it is.

If he says that one more time! So how it has to be is not what he will do about this letter, this document passing a sentence on his life, but what we are going to do. She has friends, thank his gods and hers, anybody's; her friends who solve among themselves all kinds of difficulties in their opposition to establishment officialdom. They have alternative solutions for the alternative society, and there is every proof that that society is the one to which he and she belong: that letter makes it clear. She abrogates any rights that are hers, until they are granted also to him. This means she will follow no obedience to truthfulness ingested at school, no rules promulgated in the Constitution, no policy of transparency as in the Board Rooms where the investment business code applies.

Julie does not tell him this; only by pressing herself against him, he's palpable, he hasn't disappeared from her, and holding her mouth against his until it is opened and lets her in, to the live warmth and moisture of his being.

He receives her, but cannot give himself. She understands: the shock, the letter finally come, followed him, tracked him down; for her, outrage, high on alarm, for him a numbing. Let's go to the EL-AY. We have to talk about this.

Ah no. No, Julie. Not now, tonight. Let us stay alone. Strangely, he began to take off the grease-darkened overalls as if he were shedding a skin, letting them fall to the floor and stepping slowly out of them. Perhaps he meant to get into bed, bed is the simplest offer of oblivion? But no.

I want to take a bath.

She heard the water gushing a long time. She heard it slapping against the sides of the tub as he moved about within it.

She picked up the paper and sat with it in her hand. That first time; he asked to take a hot bath, she heard him there; when he came out holding the neatly-folded towel he was barefoot in his jeans and she saw his naked torso, the ripple of ribs under shining smooth skin, the dark nipples on the pad of muscle at either side of the design of soft-curled black hair.

That's how it is.

They are to meet at The Table in his lunch break. That's the arrangement; she would not come by at the garage for him to join her—if one did not know what was to be done, at least here was a procedure begun, that trail that led through her from the garage to the cottage must be deflected. Look for him somewhere else.