Oom Lukas Malgas reappears at the gate in his shirt with the threadbare collar. He takes a R100 note from a brown envelope and looks at it as if it’s a mirror showing someone else’s reflection. He walks over to a woman on a chair in the shade. She belongs to a burial society that sells funeral policies. Each month she comes to collect money from oom Lukas and her other customers right here.
“Twenty-two rand a month for a hole, a coffin and flowers.” Oom Lukas laughs with his mouth but not his eyes.
Now more people are coming out of the gate with their money. Some go to stand in line at the white Mercedes with the two men still waiting inside. One of the men opens the window a crack, and one by one the people start counting off notes and passing them through the narrow opening.
The men are secretive. One says his name is Wilton Booyse. He sells hampers. “Fifteen kilograms meat, ten kilograms white bread flour and various tins for around five hundred rand,” he explains. “I go to buy everything tomorrow, and then it gets delivered to the people here.”
It’s difficult to fathom exactly how Wilton’s business operates. It sounds as if some of the people are still paying off last month’s hampers, even though they’ll be getting new ones in three days’ time. Wilton’s brother next to him in the Mercedes runs a cash loan business. For every R100 you borrow, you have to repay R130.
Around me, the town is becoming louder. “Oh, take off your shoes. The earth beneath your feet is ho-o-ly,” the loudspeaker next to the Nissan Sentra at the gate has begun singing again, while bedding and toilet rolls change hands and men walk over to the Grand Bottle Store in the main street, which is having a special. Buy a bottle of Old Brown Sherry and stand a chance to win a blanket. Under a pepper tree, a baby boy on a dirty pink bedspread lies with his feet in the air as if he’s floating on invisible water. I try to strike up conversations with the young mothers about their babies, but how on earth do you ask, without being rude: “Did you decide to have this baby to get R250 a month?” I don’t see a young mother with three or six children anywhere, and wonder whether this isn’t the type of myth that speaks of all our fears, a story we tell ourselves to try and give a face to the statistics of poverty? Or a story used by those who have given up, to justify their despair?
5.
Outside Laingsburg, on the N1 on the way to Beaufort West, I see a group of hitchhikers on the left-hand side of the road. I slow down and count them: eight – five men and three women.
The typical hitchhiker who stands next to the road, thumb in the air, is something you don’t see much any more. Three of the eight are sitting. One (a woman) is leaning with her back against a white concrete road sign, the other two (men) are sitting on rocks, their feet planted in front of them.
The woman sluggishly lifts a hand, palm upwards, when she spots my bakkie. Not far from her, a young man in jeans with big turn-ups is waving something in the air. Nearly everyone has a neat bag on the ground beside them.
I don’t know if this has to do with the spread of cheap Chinese goods throughout the country, but you don’t see a hitchhiker with a worn suitcase tied with a belt or a piece of string any more. He – or she – often has a proper travelling bag, sometimes even with a label that says Gucci – genuine fake Gucci.
Eight pairs of eyes watch me as I approach. It’s a R10 note the one with the turned-up jeans is waving at me. The woman leaning against the road sign has a bandage around one arm. One of them calls out something, but I can’t hear anything through the bakkie’s closed windows.
Then they’re behind me.
They grow smaller and smaller in my rear-view mirror, an odd picture of wretchedness that settles somewhere in my memory.
We haven’t spoken today, Pa and I. When I reach the open road on the other side of Laingsburg, I pull over. The Swartberg Mountains are a dark ridge in the south. I dial Pa’s number. His cellphone rings and rings and rings and rings. Then it stops ringing, but the voicemail doesn’t come on. For a few moments there’s silence, then a shuffle, then I hear him: “Hello … Hello.” His voice is very soft.
He’s been in bed all day, I just know it. When the phone rang on his bedside table he struggled first to find it, and then to find the right button to press.
I picture him on the bed with the imbuia headboard in the room with its pressed ceiling. The bedside table always has more or less the same things arranged on it: a Bible, a flashlight, an old Westclock alarm clock, a can of Old Spice deodorant, a glass for soaking his dentures at night.
“I’m still in bed,” he says. “I’m short of breath again today. Where are you?”
“Between Laingsburg and Beaufort West,” I say.
“Just remember, I’m with you in that car, son. I’m sitting right next to you. Don’t you forget that. But believe me, your pa’s had it.” Silence. “Where are you going next?”
“I think I’m going to Pofadder, Pa.”
“Pofadder? Ag, son, why?”
“I want to see what the bank robbery did to the people.”
“When are you coming home? We’re waiting for you. It’s time you came home.”
I don’t know how many times I’ve driven along the N1 without stopping at Prince Albert Road station.
The name can be misleading because Prince Albert Road station is about forty kilometres from Prince Albert. It has a filling station, the North & South Hotel, and a few railway houses on each side of the railway line.
The door and window frames of the station building have been broken, and wasps have made nests in the rooftops. A Camry with a dented right-hand side is resting in front of the North & South. CY number plates. Bellville. A man is asleep behind the steering wheel, leaning to one side, with the window open and a bottle of Amstel between his legs.
In the bar, at the wide, dark counter, there’s one customer, a long, thin, greyish man in Jet Stores denim with a packet of Princeton cigarettes and a bottle of Castle on the counter in front of him.
“What’s the deal with the guy in the Camry outside?” He looks at the barman.
“No, I don’t know. It was early when he got here and ordered a beer.”
“And his car?”
“He says he was hit by a lorry.”
“Did he hit the lorry? Or did the lorry hit him?”
“He says it was the lorry that hit him, but I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“A woman came and asked him for money.”
“His wife?”
“No, one of the whores along the road.”
This morning’s issue of Die Burger is lying on the counter:
Pofadder. – The bank in Pofadder has been robbed.
This peaceful Northern Cape community about 170 km east of Springbok was shocked when five men robbed the local FNB branch.
According to Capt. Cherelle Ehlers, a police spokesperson, five men entered the bank at about 15:30. One of the suspects was armed with a .375 Magnum revolver, and another with a knife. They used the weapons to threaten bank personnel but no one was injured. The robbers escaped with an undisclosed sum of money.
The two armed robbers were arrested shortly after the incident and the stolen money was recovered. The three remaining suspects were later arrested near Springbok.
When I go outside again, the man in the Camry is still fast asleep. He’s leaning to the left, as if still trying to escape the force of the accident.