A song in the morning

. . . Jack didn't ask what he should do if the phone didn't ring. It was for Jack Curwen to make decisions, not to ask what he should do. His responsibility, all on his shoulders.

Jan said he would come back to the flat in the morning. Ros didn't say when she might see him again. He thought he was alone because he could not imagine how a crippled student and an insurance office desk worker could help him work the break out from the maximum security cells of Beverly Hills. Hard put to see how he could help himself.

He hadn't eaten since breakfast.

He looked in the fridge. There was yoghurt, and some cream cheese, and the remains of a bowl of salad, and some salami slices. He reckoned the girl who lived in the studio flat must be a virtual skeleton. He cleaned out the fridge.

He quartered the large room. It was a compulsion, to see how the single parent lived, what she read, what she wore.

He couldn't have answered for this violation of her privacy other than by saying it was a symptom of his aloneness.

He found the building bricks.

They were the same as he had had when he was a kid.

They were the same as Will had back at Churchill Close.

Lego bricks, product of Denmark, there was a bread bin of them.

Jack sat on the floor and laid out his plans of Beverly Hills, and built the gaol in plastic bricks of blue and red and yellow and white. He built technicolor perimeter walls.

He made C section from red bricks, and administration in yellow, and A and B sections in white. He made the exercise yard of C section 2 in blue. He made a watchtower behind the gallows block, and he built towers where the flood light stanchions were set.

He was a child at play.

There were no roofs for his buildings. He could look down into each cubicle he made, into the cells, into the corridors, into the exercise yards. He put a door between C section's corridor and C section 2's corridor. He put a door on a cell.

He could count the number of the doors, he could count the number of the walls.

With the bricks that remained he located Pretoria Local and Pretoria Central and the White Politicals and the Women's. He scattered the prison staff homes, and the self service store, and the recreation and swimming areas, all on the north slope below Beverly Hills. Level with the gaol, on the west side, he put the Commissioner of Prison's residence.

He laid out a sheet of paper for the rifle range on the east side. He made a broken line with the last of the bricks to make the outer ring of wire fences on Magazine Hill to the south.

He sat cross-legged, his back against the bed, and gazed down at the gaol. A long time he sat, unmoving, searching for the plan, worrying for the route. He sat in the half light, only the light beside the bed on. Searching and worrying.

Jack stood. He went to the kitchenette area of the room and rifled the drawers and cupboards until he found a set of cooking scales. From his suitcase he lifted out the package of explosives. He didn't think the wrapping would weigh much, not enough to confuse his calculations. He weighed the explosives.

He had fifteen pounds and four ounces of plaster gelignite.

He replaced the gelignite in the suitcase, laid it beside the wrapped detonators and the firing wire.

There was a telephone beside the bed.

It was an impulse, born of aloneness. It was eight minutes to three in the morning, Sunday morning.

Below the flat, Hillbrow slept. The streets had at last quietened.

He wondered if his father slept.

Jack knew that if he did not make the call then he might just as well take a taxi to the airport in a dozen hours' time and book a flight and fly out.

He found a book with the code and dialled. He had made up his mind.

* * *
The ringing of the telephone scattered the cats.

The bell drove them from the newspaper covering the kitchen table, and from the cushioned chair beside the stove, sent them scurrying to the dark corners.

George Hawkins blundered into the kitchen, groping for the light switch, reaching for the telephone. He heard the distant voice. No rambling small talk, no crap about the weather, nor about the time in the morning.

The wall was twenty feet high, it was eighteen inches thick. What was the minimum explosive required with a conical shaped charge of nine inches in diameter to knock a man-sized hole at ground level?

"Bugger . . . "

George needed paper and pencil. Couldn't find them.

Didn't know where he'd last put them. Had to do the calculation in his head. And he was half asleep.

"Shit . . ."

And the boy was talking about minimums. If he was on about minimums, then the boy was in trouble, deep bloody trouble.

"Twelve pounds is absolute bloody minimum. Problem with the minimum is that the concrete on the far side of the reinforcing mesh may not be broken clear. Ideal would be fifteen to eighteen."

The minimum?

"That's twelve pounds."

How could the reverse end of the firing tube be blocked?

"Concrete mix."

Could the conical shaping be lightweight, aluminium?

"Not important that it's heavy. It's good if it's lightweight."

How much stand off should there be from the firing end of the metal tubing to the wall?

"For a man-sized hole you should have six to nine inches

. . . Twelve pounds of explosive, that's the absolute bloody bottom line . . . "

The telephone purred in his ear.

For a full minute George Hawkins held the receiver against his face, shivered in his pyjamas. He put the telephone down and went and sat in his chair and he called for the cats and rubbed the warmth into his bare skinny feet. George Hawkins shook his head, slowly, sadly. He had been asked for the minimum. He had answered the question. Twelve pounds was the bloody border line. The boy was in trouble.

He sat for an hour with his cats on his lap before he eased them off and went back to his cold bed.

* * *
As the city slept late on Sunday the colonel worked at his desk. He had excused himself from taking tea with Aunt Annie's relations after church. He had told his wife to offer his apologies to the minister.

He read the reports that had come in late the previous evening. He couldn't have waited for them the previous evening, because the loss of Thiroko had been too great a blow. It should never have been left in the hands of Recce Commando, that he was certain of. He had been sure of it all through the late hours at home as he had listened to his wife, sniffling and talking of Aunt Annie.

Another day, another opportunity.

He gutted the reports.

A White male. Age between middle twenties and thirty years. Grey trousers and a green sports shirt and a mauve sweater. Common to both sales.

An English accent.

The reports were specific. Not an English accent that was South African. Not the accent of a long term English immigrant . . . and they were pigs who should never have been let into the country, hanging on to their British passports, shovelling money out of the country, sending their kids away to avoid army service, sneering at the Afrikaners who had made the country . . . The accent of an English Englishman.

The purchases had been made within one hour of each other on the day the bomb exploded.

Under the reports he had two photo-fit portraits. They had been built as mosaics from the descriptions of the two shopkeepers. The hair style, the deep set eyes, the strong nose, the jutting chin.

It was the colonel's belief that he stared at the two faces of one man. They were the faces of the man who had destroyed the back hallway of John Vorster Square. And his mind could wander. If he had been consulted he would have argued strongly against the use of Recce Commando in the tracking and failed capture of Jacob Thiroko. He had not been consulted and as a result he had been denied the chance of extracting information from one of the best sources he'd ever been close to. He had scarcely slept for rage.

He went down the stairs to the incident room. He let it be known, that in his opinion, from the weight of his experience, the bomb was not the work of Umkonto we Sizwe.

"I believe it was thrown by an individual who arrived recently from England, otherwise more care would have been taken in the purchase of the materials. It should be assumed that he came to South Africa very shortly before the attack. The airports should be checked. You should look for a flight from Europe because the shop men have given him a pale complexion, he hasn't been in the sun. You should also check every one of the city's hotels. That is my suggestion."

He knew his suggestion would be taken as an order.

• * *
"You'slept on it?" Jan asked. "My decision, yes."

"No flight?"

"No," Jack said.

A pointless question. Jan could see beside the unmade bed the toy building that was Pretoria Central.

"I don't want to . . ."

Jack cut in. "You don't want to get shot."

"I don't want to start something that is impossible."

"It's an over-used word."

"You don't have explosives and you don't have weapons."

Jack waved him quiet. He told Jan about the fifteen pounds of gelignite, saved from the John Vorster Square bomb. He told him about the detonators and the firing fuse.

He saw the surprise growing on the boy's face.

"Didn't you trust us?"

"Nor myself."

"Each one of us, the activists of Umkonto we Sizwe, each of us has an implicit trust in our Movement."

"It was sensible to be careful, it's nothing to do with trust.

Jan, I have to have more explosives or grenades, and I have to have firearms. I have to have them."

"I'm just a courier," the boy said, and the nerves showed.

"I have to have them, Jan."

"By when?"

"Tonight."

"That's impossible."

"Over-used word, Jan."

Jack started to make the bed. Jan paced the floor, there was the rhythm of the shuffle and the thud of his feet. Jack smoothed down the coverlet. He thought he would never understand this boy. He could understand a man such as Thiroko, and the young men who had died with Thiroko.

Blacks fighting for what Blacks thought was theirs. Couldn't place this crippled boy in the game, a White fighting for what Blacks thought was theirs. He thought it was all to do with the foot. He thought the misshapen foot had alienated the boy from the White society around him. He thought the boy must find a satisfaction from his hidden betrayal of his own people.

The boy stopped, turned. He faced Jack squarely.

"I'll be back in an hour for you."

After Jan had gone, Jack sat again on the floor beside the model. He was drawn to an approach to Beverly Hills from the south side, over Magazine Hill. He knew why that approach appealed to him. Defence H.Q. was to the north.

The east approach was through Pretoria Local and Pretoria Central. From the west he would have to cross beside the police dog training school, and the secure mental hospital.

He did not know what was on Magazine Hill, and ignorance was a comfort, his only ally.

* * •
"You're not usually here on a Sunday morning, Sergeant." "Overtime, Carew. I get time and a half on a Sunday morning. I need the money, what with retirement coming.

You can always get overtime on a Sunday. The young fellows don't want it. They want to be with their families, get outside the city, get away from here."

Jeez had eaten his breakfast. His breakfast on a Sunday morning was the same as on any other morning. Jeez had eaten porridge made from maize, with milk. And two slices of brown bread, with thinly smeared margarine and jam.

The same as on every morning that he had been in Beverly Hills. He had three more breakfasts to eat. He would be gone before breakfast was served on Thursday. He had drunk his mug of coffee. He knew that he would get one meal that was different to all the other meals inside Beverly Hills. On Wednesday afternoon he would have a whole chicken for his dinner, cooked by the chef in the staff canteen. For the last meals there was always a whole chicken for the condemns who were White. He couldn't remember where he had heard that, whether it had been from way back when he was on remand, or whether he had read it in the newspapers before his arrest. It was a part of the lore of the condemns that they were given a whole chicken the dinner before they were hanged, just as it was part of the lore that the Blacks only had half a chicken. Jeez couldn't believe that, that the pigmentation of the skin made the difference between two legs and two wings and two breasts, and one leg and one wing and one chicken breast. And he wouldn't get to know, because he was buggered if he was going to beg an answer from Sergeant Oosthuizen.

Jeez wasn't sharp that Sunday morning.

So dull that he didn't even question Oosthuizen's claim that he was only at work to get time and a half for his nest egg. There was a weakness in Jeez's legs and in his belly. It was with him more frequently, as if he had a cold coming on, and the microbe was fear. Couldn't rid himself of the fear, not when he was locked in his cell, not when he was alone, particularly not when the high ceiling light about the wire grille was dimmed, when he was alone with his thoughts of Thursday morning and the rambling night sounds of the gaol.

The sounds carried into the upper areas of the cells and through the open windows to the catwalks, and from the catwalks they eddied to the next window and floated down from there to the next cell, and the cell beyond that.

The young White, the one who hadn't been there for more than a few weeks, always cried on a Sunday morning, in the small hours. Oosthuizen had told Jeez that he had been an altar boy, was a Roman Catholic, and cried because when he had been a teenager he was out of bed early on a Sunday morning and away to his local church for first Mass. Oosthuizen had confided that the young White was getting to be a pain with his crying. The old White, charged with killing his wife for the insurance, he coughed and spat each morning to clear the nicotine mucus from his throat. Oosthuizen said that the old White smoked sixty cigarettes a day. Oosthuizen had once said, in his innocence, that the old White would kill himself by so much smoking.

There was the crying and the coughing and the slither tread of the guard on the catwalk, and there was the sound of a lavatory flushing. There was laughter from out in the corridor, where the prison officers played cards to pass away the day.

Faintly he heard the singing.

Just a murmur at first.

The edges and clarity were knocked off the singing by the many windows and the yards of the catwalk that it passed through. The singing was from right across the far side of Beverly Hills, from A section or B section. Jeez saw Oosthuizen fidget.

"Who's it for?"

"I'm not allowed to tell you that."

"Sergeant. . ." Jeez held Oosthuizen with his eyes.

Oosthuizen pulled at his moustache, then shrugged, and dropped his voice. "For the boy who's going on Tuesday."

"Who is he, Sergeant?"

"Just a Coloured."

The whole place was mad. There was a worry that a man smoked too much and might harm his health before it was time for him to have his neck stretched, which might just do his health a bit more harm. There was worry that a prison officer who was retiring on Thursday might get into trouble for a quiet conversation on his last Sunday morning.

"What's he like, the fellow who does it?"

"You trying to get me on a charge sheet, Carew?"

"What's he like?"

The voice was a whisper. "He's damned good. . . Doesn't help you to think about it, forget what I told you . . . He's as good as anywhere in the whole world. He's fast and he's kind, a real professional."

He won't hurt you, Jeez. So get a grip on it, Jeez, because old Sergeant Oosthuizen says the executioner's a hell of a good operator. Great news, Jeez . . .

"I'll walk with you on Thursday morning, Carew. I'll hold your arm."

Jeez nodded. He couldn't speak. He didn't think Oosthuizen had attended a hanging in years. He thought that Oosthuizen had made him a bloody great gesture of love.

"I'm going to do the rosters so's I get Monday in here for the day shift, and then I'll have Tuesday off, and then I'll come on again for Tuesday night, and then I'll have Wednesday off and I'll be back on again for Wednesday night, and I'll stay on through . . . "

"Why, Sergeant?"

The words came in a flood flow. "Because you aren't the same as the others. Because you're here by some sort of accident, I don't know what the accident is. Because you're covering for something, I don't know what it is. Because you shouldn't be here. Because you're not a terrorist, whatever you've done. Because you had the way to save yourself, I don't know why you didn't take it . . . It's not my place to say that, but it's what I think."

Jeez smiled. "Not your place, Sergeant."

He watched the cell door close on Oosthuizen.

A hell of a week to look forward to. Clean clothes on Monday, and fresh sheets. Library on Wednesday. Early call on Thursday . . .

* * •
Jan had been home, spoken to her, and gone. Ros waited for her father to leave for his Sunday morning round of golf.

He played every Sunday morning, then came home for his cold lunch. In the afternoon he would do the household bills and write letters. Her father didn't take a drink on Sundays, not even at the golf club. She waited for her father to leave the house, then went to their bedroom.

Her father always brought her mother breakfast before he left to play golf. The maid had all of Sunday off. The family fended for itself without her for one day a week. Every Saturday night and every Sunday night the maid took the long train journey to and from Mabopane in Bophutatswana where her husband was out of work and where her mother looked after her five children. The maid was her family's breadwinner. And when she was away the van Niekerks let the dust accumulate and filled the sink with dishes and were content in the knowledge that it would all be taken care of on the Monday morning.

Ros told her mother a little of the truth, a fraction.

Ros said that she and her brother had met a pleasant young Englishman. She said that she was sorry that she had stayed out for a whole night the previous week, and offered no explanation. She said that she was owed time from work, and she was going away with the Englishman and her brother for Monday and Monday night and all of Tuesday. She'd laughed, and said she'd be chaperoned by Jan.

When she was her daughter's age, her mother had used to drive with her father through the night to Cape Town, for the weekend, more than 1400 kilometres each way, and sleep together in a fleapit, before they were even engaged.

She wondered why her daughter bothered to tell her what she was doing, and couldn't for the life of her fathom why the girl was taking that awkward, intense brother with her.

She thought it would do her daughter the world of good to be bedded by a strong young man. Half the daughters of her friends were married at Ros's age, and some of them already divorced. She thought there was something peculiar about her own girl's plain dressing and shunning of make up.

She slipped out of bed. She slung a cotton dressing gown across her shoulders.

She took Ros to her dressing table and sat her on the stool.

She did what she had not been allowed to do for ten years.

She took the girl in charge. She changed Ros's hair, lifted it, swept it back and gathered it into a red ribbon. She put on for Ros her own eye make-up and cheek highlight and a gentle pink lipstick. She didn't dare to stop. She could hardly believe she was permitted to make the transformation.

She let Ros gaze at herself in the mirror above the dressing table.

She said, "This young man, he's an immigrant?"

"Just a visitor. He's hoping to go back to England on Wednesday or Thursday."

Ros saw the flush of her mother's disappointment.

Later, when her mother had gone back to bed, Ros went to her father's desk and took from the bottom drawer the key to the gun cabinet that was bolted to the wall of the spare bedroom. Gingerly she took out a pump action shot gun, a box of cartridges, and her father's two revolvers along with a second box of .38 ammunition. She returned the key before hiding the weapons and ammunition in her bed.

* • •
The road was straight and the ground on either side of it was barren waste. Jan talked, too bloody much. He turned his head and shouted through the visor of his crash helmet, and Jack had to lean towards him to hear anything through the thickness of his own helmet. For Jack it was little short of a miracle that the Suzuki moped was able to carry the two of them.

He felt a complete, conspicuous idiot perched on the pillion, squashed into Jan's spare helmet, towering above the kid as they dribbled along at thirty five miles an hour.

They were heading for Duduza, some fifty kilometres southeast of Johannesburg.

Staccato bursts of explanation from Jan.

Past mine workings, through small industrial towns, past a row of empty bungalows deserted because the White staff had left when the mine was exhausted and the homes had been left to the weather and to disintegrate alongside a shanty town for Blacks.

They were on a straight stretch. High grass beside the road. Jan leaned back to shout.

"A White woman was driving past here, couple of years back, before the state of emergency, she was pulled out of her car, killed. It was kids from Duduza did it. Just about here . . . "

Jack remembered what he had seen on the Pretoria road.

The picture was clear in his mind.

"At that time the Whites had killed hundreds of Blacks, and Blacks had killed two Whites, but the fascist law and order lobby went to work. It was vicious what the army and police did in Duduza. Most of the mothers tried to get their boys out, in girl's clothes, get them away and over the border. Just like the class of '76 in Soweto, there is a class of '85 out of Duduza. Those kids, now, they're in A.N.C.

schools in Zambia or Tanzania. They'll come back when they're trained. There's no escape for the Boers . . ."

"I don't want a bloody debate," Jack yelled.

"You'll be in a debate when we get to Duduza."

"Then it'll keep until we get there."

Why should anyone help Jack Curwen? Why should anyone in Duduza lift a finger for Jack Curwen? He didn't give a damn for any of their slogans. His only commitment was to his father.

"You know that racism is endemic among Whites?"

"Not my business, Jan."

Warm air blowing past Jan's helmet, dust skimming from the tinted screen of Jack's visor.

"Take the courts. Take the difference between what they do for A.N.C. fighters, and what they do for the right wing scum of the Kappiecommando or the Afrikaner Weerstand Beweging, that's A.W.B., pigs. Are you listening, Jack?"

"Jan, shut up, for Christ's sake."

Jack heard Jan laugh out loud, like he was high.

"Jack, listen . . . If a Black throws a petrol bomb it's terrorism, if it's the White backlash then it's arson. A Black explosion is treason, a White explosion is a damage to property charge. A Black arms cache is plotting to overthrow the state, but if he's White he's done for possession of unlicensed weapons . . . Isn't that racism?"

"I'm not listening to you, Jan."

"You better make the right noises when we get to Duduza, if you don't want a necklace."