The Pickup Part 6

Now suddenly he talks to the girl as if what he has to say needs to be broken to the client through someone close to him*too blunt to be borne directly. *He will have to leave the country within ten days. I was able to extend that from a week, for him.*

They go back*are back*at the EL-AY Cafe.

Where else is there to go, for her? And for him, there never was anywhere, anyone.

She tells their story to her friends over and over, as this one and that joins The Table at different points in the recounting. They want all the details, it's their way of showing concern; they repeat them, weighing them over, asking the same questions, a part-song. All around, the coming-and-going, the laughter, sc.r.a.ping of chairs, winding of tape-music, tossing back of hair, flamboyant greetings, murmurs, is unabated: The Table might just as well be having a birthday party.

*Told you before, my Brother, disappear. That's the only way. Like the Mozambiquans, Congolese, Kenyans, whatnot.*

*But he'd better make it somewhere else. Durban, Cape Town, clear out of here.*

*Absolutely not! This's the only one big enough, it's the labyrinth to get lost in.*

*Of course, else how do all these others get away with it?

Tell me. Tripping over their carvings and schmuck on every pavement*you find them everywhere gabbling happily in their Swahili or French or whatever. So many of them no-one can get a hold. Sheer numbers. They can't be caught.*

*It's night in there, man. They're black like me. This guy here, Abdu, he's not one of them, his face and everything*it tells the story.*

*Schmuck*what's that*

*Not some kind of dope, I can tell you*kitsch, if you're able to recognize it when you see it.*

*I still think you had the wrong lawyer. You're just too well-brought-up, Julie, Northern Suburbs clean-hands stuff, G.o.d-on-Sundays only sees a sparrow fall, girl, he doesn't deliver thou-shalt-not to corporate fixings but he ordains it isn't nice to use crooked lawyers. You can't tell me something couldn't be fixed. Christ, the top man down at Home Affairs here has just been relieved of his job, grounds of corruption ...*

Julie is sounding the wood of The Table with spread fingers. *I'm not so innocent, not of what's done where I come from or at Home Affairs. It's just what you've suggested that's the problem. When it comes to fixing. No fancy scruples.

We've got it on good authority that everyone down there is scared stiff to open a hand, now. He'd only find himself ar-rested for offering bribes, in addition to everything else*

*Naa-arh ... the higher you go the less chance you have of being reached. You can't tell me that with the right connections ...*

Thinking of her father, yes; there's always been an under-current of keen awareness of her father's money The Table concealed from Julie, in contrast with the lack of vintage Rovers in the background of this speaker and others among the friends. The exceptions*her fellow escapees from the Northern Suburbs*know that Nigel Ackroyd Summers would not approach a cabinet minister with whom he dines to ask that this illegal alien from a backward country should continue to sleep with his daughter. From one of them, a quick dismissal: *That's just not on, Andy.*

*But you can't tell me ...*

*If all those hundreds*thousands*get away with it, there must be a solution. You have to ask around. Everywhere.*

Where is there?

She waits for answers that do not come; the friends have always huddled together with solutions for everything that happens to any one of them. The alternative solutions of alternative lives?

Even if it were only, in the life of the one sitting among them every day under life-sentence of AIDS, to transform the news from unbearable to the solace of laughter, that time.

*Disappear, my Brother. Like I say.*

Their old hanger-on, the poet, has been present, silent through repet.i.tions of the story. He folds a sheet torn from his chap-book on which he's just written something and pushes it into her hand.

Back at the cottage she comes upon a crackling in the shirt pocket over her left breast. She feels about the pocket everywhere, ask everywhere takes out a bit of paper, distrait, he is drinking water, one gla.s.s, two gla.s.ses, deep swallows over the sink, he gasps with the last and slowly shakes his head. She unfolds the paper and reads what is there.

'This isn't all but it's the first part and it's by someone called William Plomer you wouldn't know of.

Let us go to another country Not yours or mine And start again.

To another country? Which?

One without fires, where fever Lurks under leaves, and water Is sold to those who thirst?

And cam dope or papers In our shoes to save us starving?

Hope would be our pa.s.sport, The rest is understood Just say the word.

(Sorry, don't remember how it ends.)'

She has read it aloud to him, but it is meant for her.

Dumb.

Might as well be. When they are talking about matters you know better than they do or ever will. You are dumb if you can't speak*speak their language as they do. You have to use your lips and tongue for the other purpose, your p.e.n.i.s and even the soles of your feet, caressing hers in the bed, in place of your opinions, convictions.

What use is that, now?

He can't make love. She has never experienced this with any other of her lovers. Without saying anything to her he takes the car*where has he gone? He comes back with the belong-ings he had left in his grease-monkey outhouse at the garage.

The canvas bag with frayed labels addressed in that unfamiliar script sags on the floor of the room where they have eaten and slept, together.

He asks her if she knows where he can get a cheap air ticket. Of course she knows; her work with those pop groups and conference personnel means she has contacts with travel agencies and airlines. And then she's looking at him, into him, in disbelief, as he speaks.

You'll do it for me? Or find where I must do it.

Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s are rising and falling under the sweater and the nostrils of her fine nose (he has never thought her beautiful but has always, since the first day when he came out from under a car, thought it so) are stiffened and flared. Something will happen, tears, an outburst*he must come quickly over to avert whatever it may be, he has his arms around her as you might resort to putting a hand over someone's mouth.

What she is struggling with, not only in this moment of practical confrontation but all the time, the days that are crossed off with every coming of the light through the gap in the curtains above the bed where they lie, cannot be discussed with him. Not yet.

Disappear. Like I say.

Either way. He disappears into another city, another ident.i.ty, keeps clear; or he disappears into deportation.

They go back again at night to the EL-AY Cafe, away from the silence in the cottage and the slumped canvas bag.

because there's usually likely to be there someone to whom she has always felt closest, among the friends.

The struggle stays clenched tightly inside her. It possesses her, alien to them, even to those she thought close; and makes them alien to her. She feels she never knew them, any of them, in the real sense of knowing that she has now with him.

the man foreign to her who came to her one day from under the belly of a car, frugal with his beautiful smile granted, dignified in a way learnt in a life hidden from her, like his name. Her crowd, Mates, Brothers and Sisters. They are the strangers and he is the known.

So what's happening?

*A b.l.o.o.d.y shame. They glide in and out of immigration at the airports with cocaine stuck up their a.r.s.e, ecstasy in their v.a.g.i.n.a*and I don't mean the kind that makes them come*but he gets turned down and kicked out.*

Neither the indignation nor the sympathy count; these are simply tonight's subjects for the usual animation and display.

Lets get some more wine, you need a drink, Julie, come on Abdu, you too. Someone pa.s.ses a joint, that's probably more like what an oriental prince needs. The poet is not there.

There is no-one. There will be no-one, for her, in this city, this country.

The two don't drink or smoke and they leave early. The empty s.p.a.ce they occupied at The Table is a silence; broken: *It's not the end of the world. Our girls been in love a few times, as we're well aware.*

*This pickup of hers's been a disaster from the beginning.*

*Come on, he's not a bad guy, he just needed a meal ticket. A bed. And he obviously knew how to occupy it.*

*I've never seen her like this. Bad, man.*

A recent addition to The Table pa.s.ses a hand over his shaven head, staring as if to follow the path The Table's intimate and the foreigner are making through Sat.u.r.day night partying that buffets them.

*Julie should chill out.*

As there is no longer any sense in playing the grease-monkey he spends these, his last few days, in the cottage. He has no appet.i.te but is constantly thirsty; lies on that bed that has also outlived its usefulness, with a big plastic container full of cold water on the floor beside him.

So he was there when she came home from her work with the envelope from the travel agency. She handed it to him where he lay. He delayed a moment, reading the name of the agency, with its logo of some great bird in flight, as if to convince himself of its portent. He made a slit in the top of the envelope with his nail and slid a forefinger along to open it.

Inside, there were two airline tickets.

She stood before him with her hands linked behind her back, like a schoolgirl.

And now's the time: there has been no description of this Julie, little indication of what she looks like, unless an individual's actions and words conjure a face and body. There is, anyway, no description that is the description. Everyone who sees a face sees a different face*her father, Nigel Ackroyd Summers, his wife Danielle, her mother in California, remembering her, her contemporaries of The Table, the old unpublished poet; her lover. The face he sees is the definitive face for the present situation. The two air tickets he holds in his hands, turns over, unfolds, verifies, materialize a face, her face for him, that didn't exist before, the face of what is impossible, can't be. So what she was, and now is*what the woman Julie looks like comes through his eyes.

They always want to be told what is beautiful about them*women, anywhere*but I suppose I never did this because I couldn't consider how I should phrase it as I can think of it in my own language now. We also have our poets she wouldn't have heard of, Imru' al-Qays, Antara. Have to understand now what I'm seeing, when I look at this girl, this woman*how old, twenty-nine, one year older than I am. But it's not the days and years, it's the living that calculates the age! She's a child, they're all children, and what she wants to do now is not something for her, the living she's totally innocent of, hasn't any real idea of, innocence is ignorance, with them.

She came into the garage like any of their women who have a car husband or father has given them, and the freedom they're not even aware of to go about wherever they please and talk to a strange man, giving orders while I get myself out from under a car and stand up, a dirty fool in those overalls, to follow her through the streets. Does she realize that a girl like her couldn't go out alone, where I'm being sent back to. I don't think I really looked at her. That day.

Well: European*but they don't call themselves that, they are not in Europe*they belong here. So*white, young, not smart but dressed in the style they think disguises the difference between rich and poor, the way my overalls outfit was supposed to disguise that I'm an illegal on the run. But she looked at me. I don't know what it was she thought she saw, there was that invitation to take coffee. And there she was in that rowdy cafe, with a strange man, a n.o.body she found if not in the street then in a place not much better. I suppose I saw her as a woman, then. She was not a blonde*I was told by my uncle and cousins about how attractive blondes were, for them*hair a no-colour brown, and smooth and straight falling behind the ears. Later, sometimes in bed with her I noticed that the ear close to me on the pillow was small and set flat to the head. Pretty. Eyes water-grey and not large, always looking at me directly. What else: eyebrows much darker than her hair, not plucked to the thin line, like the girls who flirt them at you, lifting, lowering frowning, at my home. Dark paint on the mouth whose muscles always move slightly, unconsciously while she follows what someone is saying to her. As if she's learning a language. Trying to. As if she knows, all right, she knows nothing. Nothing!

It's impossible, this idea of hers. What could she do there.

What'm I expected to do with her. There. Responsible to her father, she thinks he doesn't matter but he's somebody in this city and I'll be the filthy wicked foreigner who's taken her to a run-down depraved strip of a country Europeans didn't even want to hold on to any longer, were glad to get rid of, even the oil is over the border. Abducted her; that is what it would be called in my country. What use will she be. To herself, to me. She's not for me, can't she realize that? Too indulged and pampered to understand that's what she is, she thinks she can have everything, she doesn't know that the one thing she can't have is to survive what she's decided she wants to do now. Madness. Madness. I thought she was intelligent. Stupidity. That's it. That's final.

For the first time since the first cup of coffee together they quarrelled. He who was soft-voiced shouted at her. He who was beautiful became ugly with anger and scorn.

Who asked you to buy two tickets. You said nothing to me.

Don't you think you must discuss? No, you are used to making all decisions, you do what you like, no father, no mother, n.o.body must ever tell you. And me*what am I, don't speak to me, don't ask me*you cannot live in my country, it's not for you, you can't understand what it is to live there, you can wish you were dead, if you have to live there. Can't you understand? I can't be for you*responsible*

She became stiff and clipped with anger.

n.o.body has to be responsible for me. I am responsible for myself.

For yourself. Always yourself. You think that is very brave. I must tell you something. You only know how to be responsible for yourself here*this place, your cafe friends, your country where you have everything. I can't be responsible. I don't want it.

103.

Nadine Gordimer He saw, could not stop himself seeing*everything change in her. All that she had been to him, the physical oneness, the tenderness, the expression of her whole being that had concentrated in the hours with lawyers, the humiliations suffered before the indifference of official communications, the recognition of him as the man he knew himself to be beneath the n.o.body with a false name*this possessed her face and body in revelation. And his words I don't want it struck the stag-gering blow.

You don't want me.

Not for her to speak those words; he heard them as she had heard them. Nothing for her to say; she knows nothing.

That is true but he sees, feels, has revealed to him something he does not know: this foreign girl has for him*there are beautiful words for it coming to him in his mother tongue*

devotion. How could anyone, man or woman, not want that?

Devotion. Is it not natural to be loved? To accept a blessing.

She knows something. Even if it comes out of ignorance, innocence of reality.

The capacity returned to him, for this foreigner makes him whole. That night he made love to her with the recipro-cal tenderness*call it whatever old name you like*that he had guarded against*with a few lapses*couldn't afford its commitment, in his situation, must be able to take whatever the next foothold might offer. That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine.

With the acceptance of love there comes the authority to impose conditions. They have never said the worn old words to one another, for her they are bourgeois cliches left behind; or perhaps it is because each would need a different vocabulary in their two languages. But there is a consequence common to both: if you love me you will want to do as I say, or at least make concessions to please me. It was right that she must inform her father of her decision. The idea filled her with dismay. He insisted. She lived through the whole scene in advance, and the actuality bore this out: she went alone and sat on the terrace where the Sunday lunches were held and the intention she announced gained preposterousness by nature of the setting in which it was heard. You have always lived your own life and in my love for you I have respected this although at times it has caused me concern*

and hurt, yes hurt. You lack consideration for what you do, indirectly, to your family, I suppose I've spoilt you, this happens with one parent or other when there's a divorce. My fault. Be that as it may. Many times I have had to stand by, ready to support you, catch you when you crash, and breathed again only when you've recovered your senses. I've never thought the people you mix with worthy of you*don't smile, that's not to do with money or cla.s.s*but I've always thought as you grew older you'd find that out for yourself.

Make something of your life and all the advantages you've had*including your freedom. You're nearly thirty. And now you come here without any warning and simply tell us you are leaving in a week's time for one of the worst, poorest and most backward of Third World countries, following a man who's been living here illegally', getting yourself deported*

yes*from your own country, thrown out along with him, someone no-one knows anything at all about, someone from G.o.d knows what kind of background. Who is he where he comes from? What does he do there? What kind of family does he belong to? What we do know, everyone knows, is that the place is dangerous, a country of gangster political rivals, abominable lack of health standards*and as for women: you, you to whom independence, freedom, mean so much, eh, there women are treated like slaves. It's the culture, religion.

You are out of your mind. What more can I say. You choose to go to h.e.l.l in your own way.

And now he suddenly looks old, her father, helpless in place of anger, it's a tactic he's used before, but she's thankful her lover isn't with her to see this.

The encounter was almost but not quite as bad as she had prepared herself to meet with the unchallengeable confirma-tion of the two air tickets*no authority remains in the father's love to cancel those*because it seems there is another crisis in the family, one she had not heard of until now.

*My daughter and my brother ... What more could hit us. Both in danger. You've always been attached to your uncle, he's the one you went to over this whole business of yours, I believe, didn't you. Do you know what's happening to him. do you? But you're turning your back on all that con-sists of your life.*

When she quickly demands: *Archie*Archie ill?*her father gestures to his wife. *Danielle had better tell you, it's better explained by a woman, you know more about the background to these things.*

After Danielle has said what she was deputed to say. and the daughter had left with an awkward embrace barely accepted by her father, Danielle went over to him and from behind his chair subst.i.tuted her own embrace about his shoulders. *What did you expect. The kind of people she's always been mixed up with. That Sunday when she brought him, I sensed trouble. This one's not like the others.*

Dr Archibald Charles Summers has been in medical practice for the best part of half a century.

After 41 years your professional ethics are immutable, like love; you've always lived by them.

For 41 years the boundless opportunities of the gynaecologist were there, his harem of beauties pa.s.sed literally through his hands. That afternoon as every afternoon in consulting hours the anteroom where they waited on his summons was full. His girls. On this day one or two among them were new acquisitions, no doubt brought there by the faith of others in the understanding and healing powers of their 'Archie'. The newcomers were identifiable because they were busy under instruction from the serene and elegant Farida at Reception, filling in forms with personal details. Farida remembers well*trust her efficiency*the two women, one the kind coming along with a first pregnancy, and the other, age on her form set down as 35, a youthful-looking woman*

well-endowed in every sense (Farida's image of her, later), expensive clothes and rings, b.r.e.a.s.t.s soft as marshmallows falling together in the scoop neck of her dress as she leaned to write. Her appointment was early on the list and she did not have to wait long. Farida knows all kinds: this was one of those who feign not to be aware that there is anyone else, any woman other than herself, in the s.p.a.ce around that self. She had not brought a book with her, as the intellectuals do, nor did she delve into her handbag or pick up and toss aside one magazine after another, as others do. One of the tense and haughty ones, plenty on their minds.

When shown into the doctor's room she greeted him as with relief at getting away to find herself with an equal. She sat back confidently in the chair across from his desk furnished with friendly tokens of patients' grat.i.tude, malachite paperweight, embossed diary, clutch of gilt and silver pens, miniature calculator, two statuettes, copies of some G.o.d and G.o.ddess*he was at once interrupted by an urgent phone call, and she picked up one of the sacred objects and turned it, smiling. As he ended the call with a gesture of apology, she-replaced the G.o.d. *Like the good Doctor Freud you enjoy having ancient art around you.*

*They are nice, aren't they. The Greek period in Egypt, I'm told.*