I’m going to start on a typical Tuesday (I’ve always found Tuesdays to be the days of the week when most shit happens). Specifically, it was in December 1984.
I was at a bus stop on Lower Beckersveld Street, Cape Town, South Africa, the World (I add the entire location because countries are found under this umbrella, although we often forget we are all in the same place).
The wind was fierce that afternoon, as it often was down on the south tip of Africa in December. My navy-blue, pleated school skirt, the billowing hem of which my hands gripped urgently, was a ridiculous mistake that I’d foreseen standing before my wardrobe seven and a half hours earlier, deciding vainly to take on the weather. On the horizon, at least twenty blocks up from this street, was the square bulk of grey slated Table Mountain, stoic and immoveable as ever. And off the Atlantic Ocean the wind was roaring invisibly, swerving around its stony bulk, sweeping across its flat top, and dropping the tablecloth of white cloud off the mountain edge. The sky, of course, was still and blue. It was always blue. And the city above this little bus stop, nestled in the shadow of the mountain, was bleached white concrete from the sun that was up there, high up there, so high and so bright, an invisible bulb of white light.
There was one other attendee with me at the unsheltered bus stop – really, we were standing under a yellow sign on the street. The other attendee was a lady in beige safari shorts and a floral t-shirt, who now tutted loudly as a firm hand secured her lawless straw hat. But the south-easterly squall was not to be rebuked, and certainly not by this indignant middle-aged woman. The wind simply gathered itself. Through tender saplings in little wired holes a fresh gust ripped young leaves, bending skinny branches doubled over. In anonymous flurry, dry leaves were scattered and swiftly buried in gathered, crusty piles. Pedestrians’ hair was mussed up, hats raised and loose flaps flying, and litter danced the Tarantella down the street. Merciless and resilient was the Cape Doctor, so named because its thirty-odd knot bluster swept away anything weak or stagnant.
Well, most things.
This’ll sweep away the cobwebs, Gran would wisely nod when the south-easter came.
It’ll stay like that if the wind shifts, Mum would warn when I stuck out my tongue.
And Dad would talk discontentedly over dinner of the Winds of Change.
But this was all still to come.
In any case, the bus was nowhere to be seen. Just a load of cars, vans, and motorbikes steaming down the wide, tar-baked road. But no bus. I scraped some grit out of my eye and checked my watch. It was late. Oh, the irony, I cried to the deaf heavens. A bootless, thirteen-year-old, silent cry at my twisted fate, to the personal offence taken at my bad luck! Because on your typical Tuesday I couldn’t get out of maths lesson early enough to catch this bus, the 3:30 Number 4 to Table View. And this would leave me waiting one whole hot hour for the next one. Today, a rare Tuesday that we had our ascribed, real teacher, and not a jobs body substitute who made us all leave row by row because ‘that was the rule’, the bus was ironically late.
Mrs Alvarez, my real maths teacher, was a sweetheart despite her frequent health issues (it was hard to complain about her absences, like it’s hard to be annoyed at an elderly person walking slowly in front of you.) Mrs Alvarez, though, understood that buses waited for no man. On a Tuesday period five, a minute before the final bell, she’d stand at the front of the class in her flouncy-hipped floral dress, tapping her sandals, and staring at her watch. Every so often her dark eyes would lift from beneath the curtain of long black hair, and to us, the tentative class, poised in our desks, bags and sweaters on ready shoulders, bus tickets in hand, she’d give a look as if to say: Not long now. She’d say it in a Latino accent (she was Portuguese). And then, at the first pierce of siren, she’d raise her hand, and, like panting hunting dogs, we’d race for the exit.
So here I was.
If the bus didn’t come soon, I’d not get my evening swim. One hour later and I’d miss the heat of the sun, because the shade would fall across the pool and the wind would chill it. It was that damned fig tree in the corner of the garden. It always blocked the last of the light. Dropped its rotten figs into the pool for me to net up as well.
Over the wind, the lady in the straw hat, asked me, “Has it been already?”
When I turned to answer, I promptly got a mouthful of hair, left it because of my skirt, and spat my reply through it. “Not since I’ve been here. I got here at three twenty-seven. It usually comes early.”
It was 3:32 when the lady and I noticed the old vagabond sitting against the cobbled church wall behind us. We only noticed him because a passerby drew our attention to him. If not for the passersby, we may never have seen the sweat-creased, dirty man who was sitting on a grey wool banket next to his trolley full of plastic sacks, coat, and sleeping bag, and nor would I have remembered him or the moment.
We heard a little commotion, the lady and I, so we paused our search for an incoming bus and turned around to see a man with neat, shiny blonde hair and chubby, pink cheeks like a hamster. First glance told me he was about thirty. He was well-dressed, in smart grey trousers and a short-sleeve white shirt, and he was smiling at the vagabond on the blanket, pointing to him and his shopping trolley of possessions. We couldn’t hear the words the blonde man was saying, but we saw him reach into his trouser pocket and pull out a few coins. At this, I cursed myself. How had I not seen the emaciated hobo sitting under the church wall? It had apparently become that such people were invisible to me. Non-existent. And there I was complaining about buses that left me late for a swim. Not like this pink-cheeked man who’d not only seen the poor soul on the blanket but had stopped to find him some money. There came a hollowing. In my gut. A guilty, hungry, seasickness. But then I remembered Mum’s words: Don’t be a martyr, Wren. You’re always such a bloody martyr. So, I quelled the void in my stomach. With what I couldn’t say.
The blonde man wiped a Rand coin on his grey trousered thigh before he proffered it, between the tips of his finger and thumb, to the vagabond. In response, a small movement came from the vagabond, a stirring of haunches, as if considering whether to take it or not. But then, with a quick step back, the blonde man took himself and the coin out of reach. And from his shirt pocket he pulled out a gold lighter, which he flicked on and used to light the edge of the silver coin. A flurry of wind quickly extinguished the flame, but, unvanquished, the blonde man bent down, cupped his hand over the lighter, and lit the coin again. After a second or so (when it was hot enough, I guessed, because his hand jerked back), he stood up, thrust forward his grey trousered pelvis, and threw the searing coin on to the grey blanket. Some final words were said to the vagrant who, beneath his woollen cap and grey dreadlocks, stared down at his dirty hands, wrestled with them a while, before he glanced first down at the coin and then up to the blonde man swaggering away.
I asked the woman next to me. “Why did he do that?”
But her firmly held straw hat looked down the road and pointed to the wobbling bus heading towards us. “Oh, look!” She turned to me with a smile. “Here it comes now!”
J March 