‘And how did he get rich?’
‘The South African way. Mining.’
Actually, I had a soft spot for David Mashilo, the former Robben Islander known for his business savvy and his sports cars. I had also spent ten years against my will on a small, inhospitable island, although to my discredit I had not used the opportunity to get a BCom.
I wasn’t sure where to put the car. In the end, I just switched off the engine where we were and we walked over to the house. Aurelia was more beautiful than her photographs, and taller too, what with the hair extensions piled on her shapely head. Under her arm she had a small hairy dog, which she shifted over to the other hip to shake my hand. She was vivacious and charming. She wanted us to come in for tea and cake, and the cool marble entrance hall was inviting, but I said we were running late. ‘We’ll lose the light.’ How often have I said that? Even at noon, it happens. She was going to insist, I think, but changed her mind when she saw the digicam.
I got my camera bags and we walked down to the street.
Aurelia and the mail nymph. It was perfect. She wanted to leave the gate open, so that the house would be visible in the background; my explanations about the wall and the street, my half-truths about the public and the private, already presented in a string of emails and repeated now, made no sense to her. The sun blared from the stainless-steel panels and my eyes began to burn. When I was on the point of giving up, it occurred to me to mention that if the gate stayed open the Charade would be in the picture too, and then she relented. But once the gate had closed, she became anxious out in the street — on foot, as she put it. A security guard with a nightstick had wandered closer from a hut at the end of the block, but if anything he seemed to make her more nervous. The dog began to yap. She buzzed the house and spoke through the intercom. In a while a young man in a nacreous suit and pimpish winkle-pickers that Antoine would have died for, wearing a holstered pistol on his belt, came to stand guard while we worked. The security cameras perched like crows on the wall dropped their beaked faces to watch. She was making big eyes and sucking in her cheeks, some crazy technique for looking good on film. The woman had been a fashion model. I wondered how I could make her stop and still get a decent shot. Meanwhile, in my shady interior, which smells of old ice and bloody polystyrene, Mr Frosty was whispering, ‘Drop the dog, drop the dog.’
‘Tell me about the survival tips.’ We were driving back to Kensington.
‘Some of it’s survival per se, with a capital S, and some of it’s health and leisure. Search on Wellness.’
‘For instance?’
She bit her knuckle. ‘Okay. Stuff about cars. Not just the obvious like leaving your windows open a crack so they’re harder to break in a smash-and-grab, everybody knows that by now, including the guys with the spark plugs. More conceptual things. Say you lose your car at Makro or Gold Reef City or whatever. If you press the remote the car will squeal and let you know where it is. It’s like whistling for a dog. A friend of mine found his car like this in a blizzard once. He saw the lights flashing under a metre of snow.’
‘That’s pretty impressive.’
‘It was in Sweden. Every society has its problems, even if it looks perfect from the outside.’
‘What else?’
‘Couple of tips from Oprah. Let’s say someone locks you in the boot of a car, what do you do? You kick out a tail light, put your arm through the hole and wave. Hopefully there’s someone following who understands that this is a crisis. Sometimes you have to be your own hero, quote unquote.’
‘It sounds heavy.’
‘We’re living in dangerous times so, ja, it’s a bit rough. But a lot of it is really useful too. I try to soften the impact by putting in some uplifting sidebars. For instance, true-life stories of survival against the odds. Have you heard of Little Milo Babić?’
‘No.’
‘He’s the poster child of survival. During the siege of Sarajevo, his mom made him a survival kit in case something happened to her or they were separated. She knitted him a jersey with his name and address in the pattern, and he had a backpack with sandwiches and juice, a change of clothes and a space blanket, his favourite storybook and a miniature album of family photos. His picture got into the papers and he became known all over the world.’
‘Did he survive?’
‘Sure, he’s not so little any more, he’s all grown up and working as a butcher in Emmarentia. I want to do a piece on him some time. I’ve made contact.’
‘He must be full of tips.’
‘You know what’s the best survival tip I’ve come across?’
‘No.’
‘Okay, listen up, this might save your life. Don’t touch your eyes when you’re at the mall. I’m serious. That’s the best way to pick up an infection in a public place: take some bug off the escalator rail or the supermarket trolley handle on the tip of your finger and put it into your body via your eyeball. Smart move. The eye is the window of the immune system. What you need to do is keep your hands at your sides or in your pockets and as soon as you get home, give them a good wash. Never mind if your eyes start itching in the Pick n Pay, you can learn not to scratch.’
Vienna Butchery makes the best schnitzel rolls in town, but you need a strong stomach for the decor. A jungle of pot plants on the counters and herds of hunting trophies on the walls have turned the place into a garish diorama. Looking down from on high, their eyes unnaturally bright, their ears permanently pricked for the rustle of predators among the ferns and rubber plants, the heads of the antelopes make the blood run in the fridges. Suddenly the meat looks freshly slaughtered. As soon as our order had been placed, Janie went to wait outside, and she was quiet as we drove back to Leicester Road.
Grabbing two plates off the rack in the kitchen, I led her out to my studio, where there is an excess of plain sunlight. The workspace has windows from floor to ceiling, and on top of that skylights it does not really need, a double-volume shed filled with light to balance the dense cube of the darkroom. I sat in the wicker chair at the door, with my legs stretched out to catch the sun, and she browsed as she ate, glancing over the contents of my pinboard, occasionally lifting the corner of a cutting with her little finger to see what was underneath.
‘What’s all this?’ she asked.
‘Bits and pieces.’
‘Reference material? Research?’
‘That sort of thing, yes.’
‘This looks like it came out of a Christmas cracker.’
‘It’s quite possible.’
The yellow card with the deaf alphabet on one side and a request for a donation on the other had been handed to me by a young man at the airport on my last trip. She hinged the card aside on its pin, chewed and swallowed, and read from the strip of paper beneath: ‘What does history know of nail-biting?’ Her eyebrows arched into a question.
‘Arthur Koestler.’
‘Cool.’
How can I say what these fragments mean to me? The awkward truths of my life take shape in their negative spaces. In the lengthening shadows of the official histories, looming like triumphal arches over every small, messy life, these scraps saved from the onrush of the ordinary are the last signs I can bring myself to consult.
Thank God for the sandwich. Had her hands been free, she’d have used the camera to take a note or two. Just for reference.
The Black Magic box stood empty on the end of a trestle table. She raised the lid by its tassel and studied the drawings of nut clusters and liqueur creams on the underside.
‘World capital of nougat,’ she said.