On our first date, we went to Gatrile’s in Sandown, her choice, her expense account. While she was sipping her sherry and I was chewing my tongue, Eddie Ledwaba stopped at our table to say hello. The poster boy of BEE, if the business pages can be believed. She remembered him from his trade union days, she told me afterwards, before the Cuban cigars and single malts. He still had a Lenin cap, but he only wore it on public holidays.
Over the mains (rack of lamb for me, sole for the CEO), Sabine told me that she and Bob Heartfield had parted company professionally and personally, in that order. Apparently he’d been caught bending the rules on certain tenders and been allowed to resign to keep his ass out of court. That was the American part of his anatomy she singled out. Soon afterwards, they decided to cut their losses and unbundle the marriage too.
Sabine had a townhouse in Sunninghill and an office in Woodmead. It suited her, this unfinished edge of the city, defined not only by the obvious construction sites, bristling with cranes and scaffolding, but by the leavings of building materials dumped on pavements and empty lots, stacks of bricks, piles of boards and fascias under torn plastic sheets, prefab huts, heaps of rubble and river sand. It was hard to say whether things were half-built or partly demolished. Sex with Sabine had a provisional quality to it too, our bodies never quite fitted together. When I left her place in the early mornings and drove away through the clutter, I had my doubts about the merger.
The headquarters of her company were in an office park near the freeway. The suite was huge and determinedly neutral, with sisal matting on the floor and some sort of ecru canvas on the walls. ‘It’s all about the finishes,’ Sabine said to me when she gave me the guided tour. Besides the MD, no one had an office as such; people sat at workstations in odd corners, perched on the edges of their ergonomically designed chairs as if they had just paused for a moment to skim through a spreadsheet or rattle off an email. Sabine’s office was so huge it made her enormous desk look small. The only other items in the room were a chair for visitors, in which I sat like a truant, and a chocolate-brown ceramic pot containing a tree covered with waxy leaves and tiny oranges. African contemporary, she said, under contract. In winter, the pot was replaced by an ivory urn and three long wands of pampas grass. The air conditioner hummed to itself. One blade in the wooden blind droned along sympathetically.
You would think that things were winding down here, being wound up. They must be on the point of moving: soon they would carry out the last few filing cabinets and switch off the lights. But the impression was mistaken. Sabine assured me that they were not going anywhere, they had been in their new premises for a year and they were settling in very nicely. The building was brilliant. You couldn’t ask for better finishes at the price.
The atmosphere of places made to be abandoned clung like cigarette smoke in my clothes. You were not meant to grow attached to them, and it was scarcely possible because they offered no purchase. The almost-unpacked, never-lived-in look was the mark of success. Everyone was a fly-by-nighter.
Our love affair was not entirely unpleasant. My side of it was pure curiosity and for her it was a case of getting back into the market with a low-risk investment. We had a lot of fun. I thought she overdid the throaty laughter under the duvet, but before I could take offence, we went back to being friends, and then not.
We turned off the N3 and drove back towards Sunninghill. I had not been in the area for years and it still seemed incomplete. Janie held her camera out of the window and took photos. My friends in the trade insist that photos are made rather than taken, but she was a taker. She took samples, clipping them out of the fabric of the unspooling world at arm’s length and barely glancing at the screen to see what was there.
On Witkoppen Road, I pulled over, turned the volume down on Classic FM, which I’d been using to staunch the flow of talk, and opened the Map Studio. Sunninghill Extension 11, where Aurelia Mashilo lived, was not in the book yet.
‘You need a Garmin,’ Janie said.
‘God no, I don’t want to go around like a pigeon with a ring on my leg. I’ll leave that to your intrepid explorers.’
‘But if you had GPS, you would never get lost.’
‘I know.’
I did have a new map of Gauteng, which I’d fetched from the AA in Park Meadows the day before. We unfolded it on the dash and found Sunninghill Extensions 9 and 10. With a bit of luck Extension 11 would be where it seemed to fit, like a puzzle piece, in one of the few patches of pale-green veld left on the edge of the suburb.
There’s an art to folding the flat earth into a pocketbook: you must learn to read the curvature of a crease, the lie of the paper land. I should write a guide to the subject, I thought as I refolded the map, and she can put it on her blog with the survival tips.
‘Why don’t you call and get directions,’ she said.
‘Let’s first see if we can find it.’
It was townhouse territory, complex country. One walled city after another, separated by remnants of open veld. Some of the vacant plots were covered with tall grass; others had been burnt to blackened stubs, revealing huge molehills of rubble. A few men waiting on a corner for work barely glanced at the Charade, supposing that no building contractor would drive such a thing. As if to demonstrate their own ingenuity as builders, they had fashioned seats from the rubble, miniature stonehenges of bricks or stools of half-bricks and planks, which allowed them to swivel managerially without raising their elbows from their knees. Casual labour.
‘I’ve got software on my phone that lets me keep track of my friends,’ she said.
‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘For laughs, mainly, but it’s also a security. I mean, if someone gets hijacked or whatever, you can find out where they are. I wouldn’t like to get a puncture out here.’
Extension 11 was a small, exclusive addition to the suburb, two blocks of newly built mansions behind towering walls. We negotiated the boom and cruised between the sun-struck cliffs, looking for the number. Here and there, through gaps in the defences, we caught sight of grey modernist bunkers, late Tuscan villas, contemporary African homesteads with walls in shades of mud and ochre.
Leora’s sister Jacqui, who is a landscape gardener, had found Aurelia Mashilo’s place for me. The photo she’d emailed had not done it justice. The wall was a cubist assemblage of nut-brown plaster, corrugated-iron parallelograms and pale drystone panels, somewhere on the trade route between Mali and Malibu. The gate was made of stainless-steel quatrefoils. A swathe of broken stone, like a half-built Roman road, lay in the shadow of the wall in place of a garden. On either side of the gate was an alcove lined with pigeon-blue slate and grilled with iron bars. These niches seemed custom-made for a Venus de Milo from Makro or a David from the Builders Warehouse, but they were empty.
As if to make up for this lack, the letterbox, which was of particular interest to me, was in the form of a nymph holding a slotted cornucopia under her arm. Ceres, I thought, or Proserpine (now and then I am grateful for my beginner’s year of Classics).
Aurelia buzzed us in, the shiny gate opened and I drove up on to a blood-red piazza. On that vast expanse of Corobrik, the Daihatsu felt smaller than a Cinquecento. The house behind the wall was an equally intriguing blend of pillars, pediments, stainless steel and layered stone. Aurelia was in the portico defying the elements in an earth-toned frock and silver sandals.
‘Sun Goddess,’ Janie said. ‘How did she make her money again? I’ll bet her husband gave it to her.’
‘She earned a pile of it herself. Not that he’s on the bones of his backside. She used to be in fashion, but now she devotes her time to charity and sits on a board or two.’