Lavigne is their man in the private-school system.
—If he insists on expelling Paul, then we have to show him up, Neil. We must go public.
Neil was solemn.
—If you go to war with the system Paul will have to leave anyway. The easiest way, assuming we want him to stay, may be to give Lavigne the donation for his music building. How much harm can music do? Do you want to hear something else?
—I’m not sure that I do.
—I didn’t either. Some people, who don’t want to be named, suspect Archie is also working with the Special Branch. There’s no real proof, from what I understand, but people have noticed that he has more money in his wallet than they expect him to have, considering the shoes he wears. They have seen him in certain parts of town when there was no reason for him to be there. Now there may be nothing to it at all. Nevertheless, once it gets started, something like that can take on a momentum of its own. But I can make neither head nor tail of it.
1973 THE PASS
At five in the morning, the Edendale bus paused at the entrance. The engine was loud. Victor didn’t open his eyes. He put his hand into the inner pocket of his Crombie coat lying beside him, the former property of a sugar millionaire whose name was spelled beneath the collar in blue thread, and felt for the pass book. There was nothing. It was impossible to accept. Victor went back to sleep, to dream about his coming good fortune. He had all the luck, all the friends, a sponsor in the caretaker, another sponsor who was going to be famous around the world.
In his dream he could almost touch the soft brown face of his father, a beacon of friendship, and see the freckles spaced evenly from his forehead to his chin. The old man had been deft. With a fingernail he had lifted the black-and-white photograph from the pass book, which belonged to a Mozambican miner returning to his country, and replaced it with Victor’s own photograph, taken by the Indian assistant from Crown Portrait Studios. Since then the endorsements at the back, stamped and indecipherably signed and dated in a table of purple ink, had been checked a hundred times by policemen, court administrators, and government clerks. No word had come from his father.
Either the pass book was in his pocket, where his blind hand couldn’t find it, or it lay somewhere beside the mattress. Victor checked under the coat and around it. Without opening his eyes he searched along the mattress.
Suddenly he was wide awake. He heard the clopping of a horse on the road, as if it were coming towards him, and stood up. Through the window he saw the tall animal between the arms of a cart, pulling the trussed bundles on the back to the side of the road. Its eyes were rigged with severe black blinkers, joined by a strut over its head. The driver, wearing a corduroy cap, stopped it outside the tea room, where it continued to switch its tail as the man went into the shop.
Victor saw the horse was no longer young. Its high grey chest, brushed with dark hair at the top and bottom, was muscled like the bodybuilders who tested their weights at the back of the hostel. He kept looking at the horse underneath the awning of the tea room and tried to ignore the discomfort rising in his chest. He didn’t know if he would be as lucky today as in his dreams.
He tidied up first so he could find it quicker. He folded the blanket under his arm and stored it under the mattress. There was nothing when he turned the bed on its side. Nothing in his shoes apart from the smell of polish. Nothing in his shirt buttoned on the hanger. Nothing to be found in the back pockets of his trousers nor in the overalls that he wore to the print shop. He felt he was trying to answer an impossible riddle.
The room was the riddle. It was hard to survey the entire area, which, besides being his bedroom, was used as a storage closet. Two mops stood in buckets beside pungent cleaning supplies. Some boxes contained broken light bulbs. They were kept, like eggs in a carton, in case one fine day they should flicker into light. The caretaker of the Caledonian Christian Men’s Hostel, his friend Mr Samuel Shabangu, hated throwing things away. So there was a roll of knotted chicken wire, tins of Dulux with spattered lids, lengths of catgut, and, on a separate blanket, various tools, spanners and screwdrivers and a spirit level, necessary for the kinds of repairs that the caretaker did on a daily basis.
Only a spell, forbidden to a Christian like Mr Shabangu, could have moved the reference book out of his pocket and across the room. Nevertheless, Victor began to check under the tins. He moved aside the heavy roll of wire to see what it might be hiding. Nothing. He had become a criminal overnight.
Victor had skirted the law to stay in town. His father had a permit when he worked at Natal Command, the barracks across from Durban North Beach, bringing oats in hot pails for the brown horses in the cavalry yard, and washing down the boots of the riders. As a boy Victor had helped with the work. They settled blankets on the backs of the horses when the regiment returned from exercise, inspected the shod feet of the animals, combed out their manes as the horses knelt in front of the barracks.
He and his father had slept side by side in a stall of their own. At midnight, he woke to hear the pleased sounds of the horses urinating, the scuffling of hooves against the stall doors, and the soft conversation with which the animals engaged each other, horses and dogs. The rough-tongued German shepherds slept nose to nose, and trotted suspiciously five metres behind the horses. Each befriended a particular horse and rider. They were liable to snarl when they were displeased, strong enough to rise on their back legs and pin Victor against the wall, powerful enough in the shoulders to hold him there as he turned his head away from the pouring out of salty dog’s breath until some expression on his face satisfied them. But they almost never bit.
Three years ago a certain individual sought to take his father’s job. That man told tales to the European staff sergeant, accusing his father of mistreating the dogs and trading their feed items to an Indian market-gardener. The accusation hung in the atmosphere despite the lack of evidence. His father’s cough had worsened while he worried about being put in jail on suspicion of theft or having the right to have his son with him in the barracks taken away. He hadn’t been able to sleep, and had lost the desire to talk to his many friends among the European riders. The pressure soon proved too much to bear. His father resigned from his position, bought the permit for his son to stay in the province so that they didn’t lose the foothold, left him in Pietermaritzburg, and returned to their native area, near Lesotho, in sight of the mountains. He promised Victor to return when rumours about the supposed theft cooled down. Since then, no message had come.
For three years, asleep or awake, Victor had never been out of reach of his reference book. The fever rose in his head while he searched again in the coat and turned it inside out. He moved the paint tins one by one and set them down in the other corner, pulled the drying rack from the wall, and, finally, opened the door to the outside. There was no lock on it. Light from the corridor came into the room and gave no clue to the whereabouts of the piece of missing property. His head spun.
The building was silent. The naked bulb above the staircase shone pale and yellow into the morning without producing any light. Victor looked past the staircase into the yard. At this hour the inhabitants were invisible, a hundred and eighty grown and grizzled, restless and fearless men, who argued from their beds and the rows of open toilets, who borrowed rapaciously and tried never to return what had been loaned except to Mr Shabangu.
The men were exhausted. The day before, in place of church, they had practised dancing on the cement. They drank jars of illegal fizzing orange beer before sharpening their knives for the fights that developed on the way back from the beer hall. They treated Victor as an extension of Mr Shabangu, sending him with messages, warnings, requests, notifications of disputes, and other announcements that were
