“Apparently nothing; I don’t know all the naughty details. But why are you interested in this long-buried story? I am sure there are many new crooks all over the city you should be looking into . . . But wait a minute, just wait a minute.” Her hands were suddenly very still, her eyes brighter and a real smile played along her perfect lips. She was coming back to life, to being the shrewd and sharp Tolo I had first met five years earlier before her devastating divorce forced her to take refuge in countless bottles and beds.
I waited.
“Of course. Sandile Nkosi. The father of the teenage boy who . . .” She left it there. “He was one of the main people in the whole thing. But though his name was on everyone’s lips, his signature was on nothing. Not even on the consortium’s toilet paper.” She shook her head at me. “Should you be doing this, Thabang? These guys are not cheap crooks, the way I hear. They think they are the local Mafia. And you know what people who have watched too many American gangster films are like. They are not really sane, some of them.”
“You don’t know what I’m looking for yet.”
“I know you are looking for some kind of revenge. But it was not the father who was driving that car. It was the son, the dead son. Why don’t you leave it at that?”
“This is not about that. That is a coincidence.”
“When I have a hangover it is not coincidental that I drank heavily the previous night. So take your coincidences and shove them up your wrinkled –” She stopped suddenly, her eyes left mine and travelled across the bar as if she was surprised to find herself in this dim, dreary place. She then fixed them on the ceiling and sat perfectly still. The way she used to sit when some idea was taking shape inside her head. That was before she began to hate thinking too deeply about things.
“I’ve been slacking off for some time now, coasting on my reputation of now-forgotten exclusives. If I don’t watch out, I’ll be out on the street without a job very soon . . . Well, if I gotta go, I might as well go out with one last big splash.” She shrugged and laughed almost ruefully.
“Tolo, Tolo, what are you saying? We don’t work this way, we help each other out but we stay in our own parts of the garden. You are a good journalist, so stay there and do what you do best.”
“And that is what? Writing crap no right-thinking person reads or believes? Interviewing charlatans every day and trying to present them as sages?”
“We all have to do a lot of things we dislike in our jobs so that –”
“Stop right there, teacher. Why are you not in the classroom, then? Why are you here with me in this bar talking about thieves instead of mathematics?”
Oh my fathers, why did I ever tell her that I had once been a teacher?
“If I stay in my garden, I want to have a say in what is planted there. Otherwise I’m gone too. And this is my last story.”
“This could be dangerous,” I said, already knowing the futility of my protest. Tolo had been slowly edging to this point for some time now.
“That’s the trouble with everyone in this country – we are daydreamers, we’ve been too lucky and we think that’s the natural order of things. Most of human history proves that to be a fallacy. Most of the things we think are new, special and unique about this country are in fact not! And –”
“Tolo, don’t start on history.”
“That’s another thing – nobody knows any history in this country, that’s why we are always in one mess after another. No one sees anything coming. Like my editor. He is always shocked and surprised, or so he claims. Now, if it was me –”
“Tolo, Tolo . . . if it was up to you, we’d have the whole city rioting and in flames before sunset.”
“Right, that’s why we news people kick the dust all over the place, clouding a lot of issues and confusing or downplaying them so that nice, ordinary people like you can go on living and not lose heart completely.” She laughed. “But I hear you – we’ve got to have a plan.”
“Don’t laugh. Once something like this starts you never know where it will end. It develops and mutates and gains momentum and the original cause is forgotten, and everyone gets burnt, including you, my nice, ordinary scribbler.”
“Momentum . . . acceleration . . . deceleration, what else is there?”
“The Black Hole.”
“Don’t talk to me about holes, black or white!”
“Tolo!”
“Thabang!”
Heads turned on rusty neck hinges to peer with reddened, wary eyes through the gloom and cigarette smoke.
I was silenced but Tolo wasn’t.
“Let’s go to my flat where we’ll at least have some privacy,” she said, already rising and grabbing her bag. She must have sensed my hesitation because she exclaimed impatiently: “Oh man, I won’t attack you. You are now a married man and I don’t want to do to your wife or any other woman what that ignorant, cheap tramp with my stupid ex-husband did to me. So I keep away from men with wives. Maybe I’m old-fashioned in that way, but are we to throw everything overboard? In any case, the world is so full of walking clichés it’s embarrassing. Not us, of course. Let’s go.”
At least we were both sober, even if I was a bit disconcerted by the turn in the proceedings.
Chapter 6
The last time I had been in this Berea flat was the time I had brought her home drunk. Strangely, maybe through some instinct of self-preservation or ingrained self-respect, that time Tolo had sobered up just as we had parked outside her building. Perhaps the gusty late-summer’s rain had helped. She had walked quite steadily right up past the security man, towards the lifts and into her fifth-floor flat before passing out on the sofa. I had let myself out after making sure that the door would lock itself behind me.
Today she was different, very sober, almost alarmingly animated – manic, some people might have said. Drunk without the benefit or the trouble of drinking, others might have said.
She went straight through to her bedroom, leaving me in the small sitting room. She left the door ajar and carried on talking. I was not really listening, as I was trying to work out how to dissuade her from her reckless intention to get involved in my plans. It was out of the question, my partners would be far from pleased and she might get hurt or put others in danger. There was something not altogether right with her attitude and behaviour. Her reasons were good and her arguments admirable but . . . this had been too sudden.
Was she not acting a little like I had during my last days as a teacher, when I had accidentally got into this type of work? I had been full of vinegar then, disregarding rules and despising regulations.
She was still talking, but not to me. She was arguing fiercely with someone over the phone and was running a bath at the same time, so I only heard broken snatches of a conversation about a party. This was it, I decided. I am not taking her to any party. I waited for her to return with this firm resolve burning in my breast. I was not going to help her get back into the bottle. I was still struggling with it myself and I’d be damned
