White people did not hear the blast, smell the fires; not then, not yet. In another part of the country, black policemen regarded as collaborators with the government were killed, and so were a few white ones, but no white suburbanite or farmer was harmed; not then, not yet. Somewhere about, Hillela worked — probably not in this order — as an apprentice hairdresser, in a car-hire firm (until it was discovered that when she had to deliver a car to a client she was driving without a licence) and in an advertising agency. She was the kind of girl whom people, on very short acquaintance, invite to parties. The advertising personnel drank white wine, their symbol of the good life, instead of tea at the usual breaks in the working day; they had many parties. It was certainly at one of these that she must have met her Australian, Canadian, or whatever he was. Categories were never relevant to her ordering of life. He stared out of beard, eyebrows, brown curls. — So I suppose you’re one of the great ‘creative team’ that persuades people to buy beer and dog-food. — She was not; she was hardly more than a messenger, she carried copy about and opened bottles of white wine. As soon as he realized she was working to eat, not out of devotion to the art of advertising campaigns, he began to assume a scornful collusion with her.
— Oh you mustn’t be so hard on them. They’re very easy-going people. They’re fun.—
— You’re quite wrong. They take themselves absolutely seriously. They believe they’re writers and artists. The muse of consumerism is the new Apollo. Look at that androgynous creature with his pink shoes and little boy’s braces. He epitomises the whole crowd. I don’t mean because he’s queer. They’re all neither one thing nor the other. Not workers, not artists. All the exhibitionism they imagine is unconventional — meanwhile they are the paid jesters of the establishment, selling the conditioning of the masses on billboards showing girls big as whales. — His yellow eyes rested amiably here and there in the room while he said these things; he even waved a hand at someone in the semaphore of this set that signalled ‘I’m making it over here’. —I’d rather watch a snake swallowing a rat, a cat stalking a bird for a meal. I’m for lives lived by necessity.—
This turn of phrase came back to Hillela as the language of childhood, from the voices in Pauline’s house. Since his manner contradicted the content of what he was saying, she thought, that first night, he might be drunk. Everyone at these parties was always drunk to some degree, with the consequent rapid changes of mood and disoriented awareness that made them so lively — they called it ‘letting your hair down’.
She smiled. — Why do you come, then.—
He turned his face away from the company, an actor going offstage, and spoke as if he half-hoped she would not catch it: —It’s necessary for me to be seen in places like this.—
He danced with her and stood in uproariously-laughing groups, an arm around her neck as a casual sexual claim understood in this circle, while jokes were told about copywriters, Afrikaners and Jews, who were present to laugh at themselves, and about blacks, who were not. It was usual for people to pair off after these parties, slipping away; outside she ran with him through the blows of a rain so strong it seemed to be attempting to strip off their clothes. It was so black and close around them that it was not until next morning she saw the outside of the house where they made love and slept the night together. It was the converted servants’ quarters of a larger house whose occupants, he said, were ‘all right’. She understood the inference, and also that she must not ask why it was necessary for him to have vetted them. (That was the advantage of having lived with Pauline and Joe.) It is doubtful if she was ever quite sure why. Everyone called him Rey, Andrew Rey, but he showed her, once she had moved in with him, a passport in another name with which he had entered the country. That was not his real name; ‘too long a story’ to explain why if he entered the country under a false identity he lived there under yet another persona. He worked as a free-lance journalist for several newspapers, including a black one, though his byline appeared only in one that was regarded as liberal while at the same time being a respectable part of the economic establishment. — Editorials full of fine phrases about the fight for freedom of the press, but when I bring in my copy on the Mineworkers’ Union Congress, the brave editor puts the red pencil through the fact that blacks are seventy-five per cent of the labour force, and they weren’t there — they can’t be members. And why does the bastard slash my piece? Because the consortiums with their half-dozen company aliases who own the mines, who own everything here, also own the paper, and they don’t want any ideas put into the blacks’ heads. It’s okay to ‘deplore’ the bombs, to be ‘horrified’ at the murder of white people in their holiday caravan by blacks who’ve turned to the Xhosa ruler of the spirits because the white man’s Christ hangs on his cross in a segregated church. But it’s not done to be ‘horrified’ and ‘deplore’ the fact that the only say blacks have is the choice between working on the white man’s terms or starving.—
Under his good-time image in the kind of company in which she had met him, his sullen watchfulness from an out-of-the-way seat at the bar where journalists drank and talked sport as noisily as politics, his different, insider’s watchfulness drinking in the dens of blacks (where he would soon catch a particular eye and turn aside for murmured, monosyllabic privacy) there was a resentment like oil under the earth, welling constantly, flammable in him. Since he could not let it blow before editors and other hypocrites, it found another path, heating him sexually. He would be withdrawn and bitter, and tell her he couldn’t tell her why — another one, perhaps, who thought her too stupid to understand. But out of this mood he would make love to her with the mastery of means, single-mindedness and passionate manipulation of human responses he could not muster in another, his chosen field of endeavour. This one didn’t make love like a boy. He might not confide, but he knew how to make bodies speak. People who saw Hillela at that time might recall the nerve-alive brightness of a young face, where he took her among people and dumped her for others to talk to; at each stage in life a face in repose, neglectful of composure, sets in the current dominant experience of the individual whose face it is — her expression was, in fact, amazement. She was aware, all the time, of the orchestration of her body conducted by him. The art director whose pink shoes had annoyed her lover complimented her kindly: You look well-fucked, darling. And she laughed and at the same time burned with embarrassment — for Olga, for Pauline; and for Joe.
She was, perhaps, happy; she would not remember. The happiness may have been partly to do with something she was not conscious of: working in an advertising agency, living with this man, she achieved a balance. A balance between leaving them all, the advantages they had offered — released by putting them in a position where they had to put her out — and rejoining without them what each had offered: Olga, after all, would approve of an artistic career in the fashionable advertising industry; the lover was someone she could have taken home to Pauline’s house. Not that the girl did; not that she wanted to. But this life, even though it was lived in an out-house like that Alpheus occupied, was not the dropout’s ramshackle of sleazy clubs and fairground jobs they believed she had left them for.