11: What Then Must We Do?
The first mission is in motion before dawn, in the cold damp hours steaming from blankets and pallets they head out into the mines, down in the trash of last night, cans, bottles, cardboard, treasure, separating into black plastics for the scrapyard scales. They range slow burdened and sure, investigating and scrutinising, every find is a fragment closer to a piece, a cap, a packet of two rand biscuits.
The scrapyard opens to a long line of black plastic bags on backs, of claimed wheelie bins, jostling to exchange their loads for caps and pieces to break the downs. And then they head to the once suburban house that now houses the HIV program and the morning methadone hand outs. The line stretches from 7am to the 8am or end of methadone cutoff. The social workers hand out two doses – one in your mouth, one for twelve hours later – in a small container which has enough space to spit in the second dose.
Methadone is not for taking, its for trading. On Fridays its a six full doses for the weekend, valuable to trade during the regular Sunday drought. One dose is a third of a cap in cash. There is nothing else to do with the methadone, Sunday makes entrepreneurs of us all.
The skarrel, the spin, continues in the drug houses, at the traffic lights, outside the petrol stations, as the clients pass out, as the clients come in, and at the feet of the dealers.
The Sunday desperation ends in the vans or with the vans. Either you are put in a van or you trade with a van. The dealers try to mitigate the afternoon pimping wave with the morning dash, but they never have enough. Someone will always try wave down a van to kill the downs.
Sunday morning mines are good for those up early enough, but Saturday nights are full of opportunities and end in dawn cutouts, and afternoon withdrawals.
Desperate enough to mission deurmekaar, the double pants tied badly, the lookout missing something, the phone theft fumbled, the risk of being munged. As soon as the risk lives in the front of the brain, the risk becoming certainty. As we pass each other, upping and downing from skarrel, spin, mission, we greet…
“Morning, how’s your Sunday?”
“Things are bad.”
“Yes, things are bad.”
There are those who do not risk the mung. They work with the mapusa. These are other risks.
Sitting on the corner, just enough away, among the paras, spinning for dots to take the edge off. I am watching the dealers and mapping the stash places.
Three blocks down the hill, around a corner, shuffling from foot to desperate, the mapusa are just not coming fast enough. As the van pulls up, I jump in, they drive, we are bunched up and the second cop wrinkles his nose. There in the shadow of the basketball courts, sketched out on the back of an arrest warrant, I do my best to map the stashes.
And then I wait. They takes twenty long minutes to come back, they couldn’t find it.
One of the mapusa gives me a fifty, tells me to go smoke, but double check the stash.
I return to the basketball courts. The van in the concrete shadow. I redraw the map. The stash has moved. Mapusa move quickly now. I wait and smoke.
They take one long hour to return. The longer they take the more likely it is that they were successful. They need time to let the dealer come around to offering them money. Even with the regularity of this practice, time must be taken to pretend it is not expected. With a fat pack of maybe twenty thai they return, throw it to me in passing, even some pieces.
When later the dealer works out that I had pimped them, catches me with the remnants of their stash, I am too numb to notice the beating.
On some corners Sunday’s bags cost five rand more. The dealers know they will have to pay the mapusa.
On Sunday’s things are bad.
At the age of twelve I fell out of a tree, hit my head on a rock and lost my memory. I had to relearn who everyone was, vocabulary, how to write. It set me back at school. My mother used to say that the person who went up that tree was different to the one that came down.
This is a lie.
Uncovered nearly thirty years later, in a series of therapy sessions that someone else had insisted I attend, and had organised, because I had been unable to afford anything at all. A lie I had constructed for myself.
There was a tree, and a fall. And a different person did eventually emerge.
The truth, that I had had an idyllic childhood, was too hard for me to bear. slowly over the period of my teenage years, I came to believe in an easier idea, that I had amnesia, that a minor childhood fall had erased any lingering happiness.
My father wanted to start a construction company, and he wanted me to work there. I know this because there was a sign in bronze outside our house that said C.D. Young & Sons.
There was only myself and my sister. My father wanted me to work with him, I know this because from as far back as I can remember, even after I had left home, he would take me to construction sites of shitty suburban houses and try to show me the ropes.
My father was a travelling salesman, I remember only now the trips to the midlands, a truck full of vacuum cleaners. Waiting in a corner shop playing Donkey Kong, waiting for my father to return from a delivery.
My sister used to speculate that my father had had an affair, I remembered this only after I had been told by my mother that I had met my half brother when I was twelve.
My father was a kosher butcher who had been disowned by this father, I remember my father watching the Jazz Singer relentlessly for as long as he lived.
My father began to withdraw and he started to drink around the time of my amnesia. Any support he had had for my ambitions to be a writer evaporated. All I remember is him pressing me to stay and be part of the imagined family business. He let me leave to follow my dreams, and on the drive to a new town, away from my imagined miserable life, we stopped at desert motel where he made one last attempt to convince me.
Sitting by a steaming swimming pool in the residual heat of the day, around midnight maybe, perhaps new years eve, the chlorine in our nostrils, he cried. And for the next twenty seven years I believed that he cried because I had disappointed him in some unimaginable way, and I resented him for putting that on me.
In a therapy session I had spent years thinking unnecessary, that someone else had paid for, that took place decades after my father’s passing, I uncovered a memory. He had once worked for his father, who had had a construction company called E.L. Young & Sons.
It is all so indeterminably wrapped up in itself.