The Innocence of Roast Chicken Read online

  ‘Ooh, touché.’ His gurgle breaks into a surprisingly high burst of laughter. He blushes slightly, whether from the exertion of his laughter or my comments about his girlfriend, I can’t say. Joe smiles absently, caressing and clutching his glass again. Paul turns to him suddenly.

  ‘What’s up, Joe? How’d your urgent go this morning?’

  ‘What urgent?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, didn’t he mention it? His union clients were hit with an urgent application yesterday to interdict them from picketing outside head office.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Joe?’

  ‘Why should I? I knew just what you’d say.’ I’m taken aback by his sudden bitterness.

  Paul, either insensitive to our small aside or wanting to defuse the building tension, ploughs straight in. ‘So how was the consultation yesterday? I saw all your guys trailing into the conference room as I was clearing up to go home. Late, were they?’

  ‘Ja, a bit. Didn’t really matter.’

  ‘Oh? So what defence d’you finally use? Were any of the ideas we kicked around any good?’

  ‘Jeez man, Paul, not a thing worked. That bloody consultation knocked every bloody idea we had right into the ground. Every one of management’s allegations I put to them, they had some story.’

  ‘You mean they weren’t there, it was the other guys?’

  ‘No, I could’ve at least worked with that. I mean they didn’t care, they said it was all true. They thought it was all OK. You remember, there was that allegation that one of the temporary workers was beaten to a pulp round the side of the building?’

  ‘Mm, I remember the one.’

  ‘So I say: “What about this then? What’ve you got to tell me about it? I’m sure management must’ve been exaggerating? Or maybe it was some skollies, unconnected with the strike? Or perhaps he taunted someone … whatever.” “No,” they say. So I’m taken aback. So I say: “You mean you admit to doing it?” And they say: “Ja, well, how else are we expected to win this strike? How else do we stop scabs?”. Jeez, Paul, they actually think they have an entitlement to beat up people and threaten violence. They say that otherwise the power’s all on the other side. How else can they win?’

  ‘So what’d they have to say about the death threats to managers?’

  ‘Well, they said: “Never mind what we did, look at how bad management is. Look at them, they won’t offer what we want. They won’t even budge from their original offer. So we have to act like this.” Can you believe it, Paul?’

  ‘Ag, Joe, what’d you actually expect?’

  ‘I’m so fucking stupid. Here I actually thought I was making some difference. I thought the right was all on one side, that it was a right-and-wrong battle. I thought it was black and white, no greys.’

  ‘So did you end up not opposing the application?’

  ‘How could we? Every allegation management made was true. They admitted it. They couldn’t give me one defence we could possibly use in court. So now they’re interdicted from showing their lousy faces within one kilometre of the building.’

  Joe’s face has sagged like a bundle of white washing that’s lost all its starch. But his darting eyes tear at one. Paul smiles gently at him.

  ‘Well, I suppose the only thing you could’ve done is get some kamikaze counsel to argue lack of urgency.’

  Joe coughs out a dry laugh. ‘Ja well I considered it, but I soon thought better of trying a stunt like that.’

  ‘What judge did you draw?’

  ‘Smit.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose there’s no way that would’ve flown, considering the circumstances. Oh well, you win some, you lose some, Joe.’

  ‘But I didn’t expect it to be like this. With everyone so dirty. And the taint on all sides.’

  ‘So, welcome to the morally complex field of labour law. So you’re no longer a knight on a white charger. Welcome to the club. Don’t take it so hard, china. You had to get there sooner or later. Law’s not like that, you know. Even labour law’s about arguments, not right and wrong. Isn’t that so, Thami?’

  He grins and squeezes the shoulder of the tall black newcomer to the firm, edging him into our group, probably so that he can escape Joe’s despair and make it back to his young articled clerk. I can see his eyes covertly following her progress across the room as she is pressed backward in the crush by the intent conversation of the senior partner.

  ‘Hi, Thami.’ Joe raises his eyes in a quick smile and instantly drops them to his drink again. I haven’t met him before, this new acquisition of the firm, this badge of their good faith that they wear so righteously, with such pride. Oh, they have of course had the odd Indian and woman attorney for some time now. But this, this good-looking product of a ‘white university’, is the firm’s very first truly black attorney. And oh, how they fawn around him here, offering him drinks and haw-hawing their red faces chummily into his quiet dignity.

  ‘How do you do?’ he says softly, bending his head towards my proffered hand in a gesture of attractively old-fashioned courtliness. ‘You must be Joe’s wife. How very nice to meet you. What was that you were saying, Paul? I didn’t catch your comment.’

  ‘No, I was just telling Joe here that he can’t expect all his union clients to be brave noble fighters of the struggle – it’s a morally complex field, same as any other.’

  ‘Jesus, Paul,’ says Joe, his mouth wincing now in humiliation. ‘I know that. My feelings are a little more complex than that.’

  ‘Yes, I think I understand what you are feeling,’ Thami says, his face serious. But his demeanour … at first I can’t quite work out what it is about him … we are all three listening intently but in our slouched cluster, we are being more polite than we were before. I suppose you could say we are being too nice, all of a sudden.

  I stare at Thami, trying to pin down what it is he brought into the group. And then I glimpse the small quirk of anxiety which catches at his mouth. He’s not a diffident man. I can see that he glows with the confidence of someone who has done well despite the odds. He has the attractive shine of someone with pride in himself, his abilities, his intellect. That’s not it.

  I think it’s us. I think he’s not that sure of our friendship, how deep it goes in this chattering white group. I have a feeling he’s not sure at what level of informality to pitch himself. At this point I am, like him, a little outside the familiar circle. And looking inward, it seems to me that, though he’s made it into the firm and the law, he hasn’t yet broken into the easy buddy banter of the people in it. Aha, a kindred spirit! I could fling myself on his neck.

  Thami’s quiet voice pulls me back to the edge of the group. ‘I think it is always … if you’ll forgive my speaking this way, Joe … I think perhaps sometimes people … well-intentioned white people, more particularly …’ He clears his throat. Slowly he unfolds his white handkerchief, dabs at his nose and mouth and refolds it. ‘I think it is easy for those people to be disappointed, or disillusioned – I’ve seen this many times, even with the white Left at university – with people they perceive as noble figureheads of a movement they admire.’

  ‘I think …’ He pauses a moment, gazing up at the ceiling. ‘You know I think we have had too many “mystical figures of the revolution” …’ he makes the quote marks in the air with his index fingers ‘… and perhaps not enough real mixing of real people. You know …’ And suddenly he does look diffident, unsure of himself in making the comment he is about to make. ‘I, well, some people could say there’s still an element of racism there somewhere – in a converse way – in expecting black public figures to behave with overdrawn nobility and being disappointed when they do not. But you know …’

  He smiles suddenly, a white wave of warmth and goodwill. ‘But I would certainly rather there were more people with your level of integrity and idealism, for the future. I think we will get the genuine mixing righ
t eventually, too.’ His smile shrinks, leaving his face dark and serious again. ‘But what I said does not mean I care for the level of violence that has characterised the strike with which you are involved. Perhaps I can understand, but I cannot like it. And it has been terribly bad for the community. It has divided neighbours and pulled people in the same community into violently opposed camps.’

  ‘Anyway, Joe,’ Paul says, snatching at the first clear pause in the conversation, ‘I must be going.’ He slaps Joe between the shoulder blades and cuffs his chin with the back of his hand. ‘You be OK, now?’ He clears his throat, embarrassed by his own concern. ‘By the way, where are you guys going for Christmas? You heading for the coast?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ says Joe, giving him a small smile of thanks and reassurance. ‘We’ll probably just hang around here. I’ve got stacks of work still, anyway.’

  ‘OK, well, see you guys soon. Must get together sometime. Maybe we could go out and eat sometime. Could you cope with my feminist clerk, Kate?’ He gives a last rumbling laugh as he squeezes me under his arm and rushes off to rescue the clerk, whose face I can just make out behind the leaning shoulders of the senior partner.

  Thami doesn’t seem to expect any response from Joe. And it doesn’t look as though he’s likely to get one. He also takes his leave, and I watch as he politely squeezes his way through the crowd to say his goodbyes and thank yous.

  ‘So why didn’t you tell me about the application?’ I ask, bringing my gaze back to Joe’s crumpled face.

  ‘Why? So you could ram it down my throat?’

  ‘But that’s never bothered you before. You always give me your Pollyanna impression anyway.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean. But this time I couldn’t face it. D’you want to know why? Because everything you could possibly have said to me I’ve already said to myself. “Naïve fucking idiot. What did you expect?” You could’ve told me what they were like, couldn’t you? You would’ve thrown all my words back in my face, wouldn’t you? Oh, how you would’ve enjoyed laughing at how I’d believed in the union’s moral higher ground, in their discipline and everything.’

  His anger and hurt splatter like shotgun pellets all over me, over himself, his clients.

  ‘Jesus, Joe, how can you be so hurt about what these total strangers do? What did you expect? They’re in it for themselves, not for you. They’re not your friends. They don’t owe you your illusions.’

  He turns away from me to the deserted yellow-lit street below us, and downs his drink.

  ‘Anyway,’ he says, gazing blankly out of the window, ‘they say they’re getting things better under control now … And maybe management will take notice. They’re also to blame. How can they just stand by without budging while emotions are running so high and things like this are going on? Shows you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe it does. But now tell me, Joe, why’d you tell Paul we weren’t going anywhere for Christmas?’

  ‘Well, what does it matter? What does it matter where we go or, in the final analysis, what we do?’

  1966 … Six days to Christmas

  My life, my childhood, the child that I was, all these were held that day in the palm of God’s Eastern Cape hand.

  There, in the creases of His weathered flesh, we began that wind-whipped flight to the coast. Half nervous, half thrilled, I felt the wind spike my short hair in forbidden abandon with the speed of that disapproved-of bakkie.

  In our desperation to win approval for this trip – ‘Oh please, plea-ease Dad, you’re always saying we should practise our Afrikaans and make friends with them, plea-ease!’ – Michael and I had tacitly agreed to stay away from all mention of the bakkie. My mother believed that only rough children rode in the back of bakkies and that, almost inevitably, they were, periodically and accidentally, flung out and killed.

  We had left early, in a landscape silent but for the clamour of chickens. I was lifted carelessly over the tailboard, feeling momentarily the rough scrub of the farmer’s khaki on my cheek. Kobus, with a foot on the tyre, vaulted over the side and stood behind the cab. Michael and I sat gingerly on the wheel humps, clinging to the rust-flecked sides with outstretched arms.

  The bakkie revved raucously and, in response to its strident call, a small dust-plumed figure darted across the veld and raced towards us. The farmer, his elbow resting on the open window, moved the bakkie gently forward.

  ‘Kom, kaffirtjie, kom,’ he muttered as the small dark figure flung itself at the side of the bakkie and scrambled, cat-agile, over the side.

  ‘Kom staan hier langs my, Jonas.’ Kobus’s words were whipped from his mouth and flung back at us as the bakkie took off over the spattering gravel.

  Nothing, for Michael and me, was as exhilarating as this wild rush of wind and sunlight. Rutted gravel roads danced our small bodies to the rhythm of that freedom as we crouched out of the still-chill breath of early morning.

  I stretched my neck backward to feel the warming sun on my face. Growing brave, Michael scrambled his way to stand alongside Kobus and the tough, laughing piccanin. Shouts of elation churned from our stomachs and whipped from our mouths as we struggled – Michael and I, more than the blasé farmboys – to hold on to the excitement, to keep the moment of flying joy within us.

  The wind whirled us through the olive-drab land, where the gravel crunched and twisted through wild clusters of gnome-like trees. Shrubs sheltered their bandy, gnarled limbs alongside them and stretched out beard-stiff leaves.

  I’d grown up with that stubby vegetation, didn’t recognise how unmistakable it was, how it could grow into a child’s heart and root there. And whether one saw it afterwards with revulsion or joy it never left one, that look of God’s dust-dry place. It was part of Him and it was part of me. I would never be free of it and He, He is still free to do with it as He pleases, to puppeteer with wicked delight the dangling desires and wanton acts of the people who live there. There they hunch, joined by an unseverable umbilical cord to their uncompromising land. As all-embracing as the wild fig tree, as generous as the baking sun, as harsh as the unremitting drought and as stunted as the repressed grey bushes.

  Shot through with the proud flame of the aloe, the land tipped rough-bearded into tangled valleys, musky with the smell of the fallen leaves and old man’s beard. Before me were the thin stalks of the boys’ legs, grey with grazes. And between them, through the dirty window, I could see the khaki hulk of the farmer seeming to fill the cab.

  ‘See the sea, see the sea,’ yelled Michael, and I scrambled upright to shove a place for myself between Michael, who still smelt of Ouma’s washing powder, and the wood-smoke smell of Jonas’s ragged shirt.

  Gently rounding over soft, furred hills, the gravel wound us down to the sea. There below us it stretched, ship-dotted to the horizon. Like the crocheted edge of a blanket, it wavered and looped into bays and inlets to each side of us. Sandy stretches frilled along its edge, brought to sudden halts by the ungiving thrust of harsh dark cliffs.

  At the foot of the hills, we passed the general store and bounced along the back of the straggling strip of ‘shacks’ to the end of the grey-packed road. The last shack was theirs, clinging sag-roofed to the edge of the hillside. Leaping from the bakkie, we followed the two boys across the front of the shack and stopped for a moment to gaze at the hulking rise of gentle green which marked the end of the scattered village. Softly grassed and furred with heather, the hill crept roundly to its crest before it was sliced off to fall sheer into the sea. Blackened rocks jaggedly replaced the delicate grassy slopes.

  There, on that day, I can remember so clearly how I licked at the smell of the sea lapping around my face. And how it washed to my stomach and my charged legs, and then I couldn’t hold myself from running, followed closely by whooping boys, down the rough wooden stairs to the beach. I could feel the salt on my eyelashes as, irresistibly, I plunged knee
-deep into the water, to be rocked and swirled by the foaming waves. Warm it felt, unbelievably warm and clear and thick with life. The air around my head felt clammy, rich and nourishing.

  Warm with promise and delight, the sun sprinkled sparks across the water and the passing ships held exotic imaginings of faraway destinations. There was nothing, nothing on earth like this wild sea, so cleansing in its freshness, so rich with abundant life.

  ‘Kom, Ouens. First come up here and change into your costumes. You don’t want to get your shorts wet.’

  The farmer’s voice, deadened by the thick salty air, just reached the edge of the booming sea. Roughly we scrambled back up the steps, legs tangling in giggled attempts to trip each other. At the top of the steps, Jonas veered off and threw himself down on the grass to wait.

  ‘Hlala phantsi, OK, Jonas? Siyeza. Ons sal’ie lank wees nie,’ Kobus called over his shoulder as we raced each other up the slope.

  The shack was everything I knew a seaside shack should be. Right across the front ran a rough concrete stoep, which the spray would just reach on wild, overcast evenings. This led us through the single door into a large central room. Here, the sun glared through the small wooden windows, whose salt-grimed glass obscured the sea. The scuffed, threadbare carpet held a thin covering of sand and a musky, slightly damp smell of sea and bait. Fishing rods stood in a corner next to a framed picture of palm trees, which someone had painstakingly formed out of painted seashells. Two walls were covered, floor to ceiling, in shelves stuffed with comics, magazines and piles of musty old books, which might have been there through several owners and paged excitedly by countless children before us.

  The two boys, still shoving and wrestling each other, shuffled raucously into one of the small bedrooms leading off the lounge. I, exploring cautiously, found another, where I uncoiled my cossie from my rolled-up towel on the humped single bed. The room had the familiar shack smell of musty old cupboards, dusty carpets and salty damp.