Certainly she had no place to sleep in alone. Not until the Afrikaner woman decided something must be done about her. Christa Zeederburg, urged to reminisce at the end of her life, never forgot the safety-pin. — Just an ordinary safety-pin, the kind you buy on a card, for babies’ nappies. That’s all she had, then!—
If you have lived your young life with Jethro and Bettie to feed you and at worst always an aunt’s stipend deposited monthly, it must be difficult to believe there is nothing for you in the houses you pass and the banks in their pan-colonial classical grey stone with brass fittings. For many weeks she was waiting for Rey to come back; that was her status. She was living in their room in an old hotel from British times which now functioned only as a bar; his radio was on the wicker table and his pyjamas were still under the pillows. He had gone on a quick trip to Sweden about a communications development project they wanted him to start in East Africa, or (depending to whom he was talking) to Germany to tie up a television documentary based on a book he was writing. She knew she could not go along. Already there had been problems; when the vehicle that took them from Northern Rhodesia arrived at their country of refuge, it turned out that although she had no passport he — quite properly, a professional in these matters — had an Irish one. He went with his companions to the local hotel in the small frontier town; she spent the night in the local jail — well, on an old sofa in the, chief warder’s office, they couldn’t put a white girl in the sort of cells they had. It was quite fun, really, she could sleep anywhere and wake up fresh. Her experience was something they joked about together, next day, all very exciting, like the leopard they saw crossing a red road at dawn. It disappeared into the bush as they themselves were doing, hour after hour, mile after mile, beyond pursuit.
He had taken only half the money. He wouldn’t hear of taking more than that; he was going to come back with grants that would keep them for two or three years, they were going to look for a flat — or an old house, why not occupy one of the nice old houses with gardens the colonists had fled when independence came to this country? She was in one, once, while he was away. Some people from the beach took her along to a party given by the representative of a European press agency. The agency operated comfortably; there was a telex chattering in what had been a children’s playroom, and the agency chief could refresh himself in the leaking swimming pool. She would have written immediately to tell what a good idea it would be to have a house like that from which the development project could be run, and the television documentary planned, but she had no address. She thought of looking round for such a house, in preparation. But the suburb along the sea was a long walk from town, and soon the taxis, reassuringly humble with their missing doorhandles and rust-gnawed mudguards, had become expensive in relation to the money she had left.
Unlike observers, she expected him back any day. She passed the days wandering purposefully about, looking, listening, smelling, tasting. The ancient town was a Mardi Gras for her, everybody in fancy dress that could not possibly be daily familiar: the glossy black men in braided cotton robes and punch-embroidered skull caps, the Arab women with all their being in their eyes, blotted out over body, mouth and head by dark veils, the skinny, over-dressed Indian children, bright and finicky as fishing-flies, the stumps of things that were beggars, and the smooth-suited, smooth-jowled Lebanese merchants touched with mauve around the mouth who sat as deities in the dark of stifling shops. Her watch was stolen in the hotel and she kept track of time by a grand public clock-face and the regular call of the muezzins from the mosques. There were no laws — nothing to prevent her going down into the black quarters of the town, here, except the rotting vegetables and sewer mud that had to be stepped through, and the little claws of beggar children that fastened on her whenever she smiled a greeting, not knowing that every day she had less and less to give away. She bought pawpaws and big, mealy plantains, more filling than ordinary bananas, down there; cheaper than in the markets. She picked them from the small pyramid of some woman whose stock and livelihood they were, arranged among the garbage, spittle, and babies scaled with glittering flies. She ate the fruit in place of lunch and dinner on a broken bench on the esplanade and did not get sick.
Olga, Pauline, even Len — they had never given her the advantage of knowing what to say to someone to whom one owes money and can’t pay. The wife of the hotel proprietor stopped her as she came along the verandah where her room was, and broke her silence.
— Going on for six weeks, and rates are strictly weekly, dear. You know that, don’t you? We aren’t running a charity. We have to pay even the yard boys the fancy new minimum wage this government’s set down, I don’t know how much longer we’re gonna be prepared to carry on, anyway. — A drop of water run down to one of the spiral ends of the girl’s hair had fallen on the dry sun-cancer of the woman’s forearm. — We have to pay for the water you’re using for those lovely cold showers you take whenever you fancy. — From the day that fellow went off with his briefcase, never mind the pyjamas left under the pillows, the proprietor had not been happy about the situation. There’d been bad experiences before with that CCC lot who’d taken over Tamarisk for themselves. That’s what the regular white residents from the old days called them: commies, coons and coolies. She looked at this cocky miss who played the guitar in her room as if the world owed her a living; looked in a way that made the girl feel she would be physically prevented, by the barrier of a scaly arm, from getting past her.
— I haven’t any money.—
She didn’t think of assuring that she was only waiting for ‘her friend’ to come back; of promising all would be set right and paid then — soon. It was only when she knew, quite simply, what to say that with that truthful statement another became true: she was not waiting. She was now one of the regular coterie of Tamarisk Beach, making out. She packed her bag and hung the room key on the board behind the unattended reception desk. The pyjamas she left under the pillows.
How are things? Oh, I’m making out. At best, the phrase used on the beach meant one had found somewhere ‘to stay’ (‘to live’ belonged to a kind of claim left behind in the home country) or that a relevant liberation organization had created a title, Education Officer, Publicity Secretary, Liaison Assistant, that provided a chair, if not a desk, in an office, and a stipend even more modest than that of a rich aunt. She had neither job, nor stipend, nor anywhere to stay unless the beach was somewhere, until Christa Zeederburg (her name should be recorded along with that of the woman art director with the octopus eyes) provided a sleeping bag on the floor of some other people’s flat. It is possible the girl actually did sleep out at Tamarisk a couple of nights, taking the warmth of the sand and the thick air for harmlessness, recklessly unaware of danger, as in one of those anecdotes about small children who are found happily unharmed, playing with a snake. More likely that whomever she drifted away from the beach with in the evening found themselves saddled with her for the night. And it was quite customary for people who had a place to stay to allow others to dump their suitcases and duffle bags there. One might live out of such a base, calling in when one needed a change of clothes. Why did she have only one pair of jeans, with a broken zipper? What had happened to the clothes, most of them quite good, she had appropriated by right of a hunted status before she fled with her lover? Clothing of ‘European’ cut and style was short in a poor country trying to save foreign exchange; probably, to buy herself pawpaws and plantains, she sold the clothes in the wrong places (Christa Zeederburg reminisces) at poor prices, foolish girl, compared with what could have been obtained on the other kind of black market. Oh if Pauline, if Olga had known how little one could make out on, in money, comfort, calculation, principles and respectability, and stay healthy and lively, with good digestion and regular menstruation!