Thank you. I have to go back to work.
She stood up, too. Thursday?
Better if you call before you come. Thursday.
It’s Julie.
But he said, Who, who d’you want to speak to.
I’m the one whose car you’re fixing, you said Thursday.
Sorry, there’s a lot of noise — yes, it’s all ready for you.
At the garage he handed some sort of work-sheet over to the owner at the office, and she paid.
Everything okay now? You’re sure.
He gave the slight shrug of one accustomed to dealing with customers’ nerves. You can try it out with me if you want.
He got into the passenger seat; she reversed swiftly between obstacles on the workshop floor, to show him she could do it. They drove around the quarter, splashing through overflowing drains, pulling up behind the abrupt stops of minibus taxis, nimbly squeezing between double-parked vans, avoiding pedestrians darting in and out of the streets like a school of fish. She was at ease; now she was part of the stampede, riding with it, chattering.
You still think I should buy a new one.
It makes sense. Next time something else will go wrong; you’ll have to pay again to keep the same old thing.
I’d buy a good second-hand car. Maybe. Maybe it’s an idea? D’you think perhaps you’d vet it, if I did? I’d have to have it seen by someone who’d know what to check under the bonnet.
If you want. I could do that.
Oh wonderful. Do you perhaps know of someone who would have a good car they’d like to sell? You might get to hear …
People sometimes come to the garage … I can look around. If you want. What kind of car?
Not a Rover, you can bet on that!
Yes, but two-door, four-door, automatic — whatever.
There was a space before the EL-AY Café. She obeyed the man-child who signalled her in with his glue-sniffer’s plastic bottle in hand. Arguing about the model of car, the level of possession appropriate for her, they left hers and took the steps to the terrace. This time went inside, this time he was taken to the friends’ table.
Hi Julie; a rearrangement of chairs. — This is Abdu, he’s going to find new wheels for me.—
Hi Abdu. (Sounds to them like an abbreviation of Abdurahman, familiar among names of Malays in Cape Town.) The friends have no delicacy about asking who you are, where you come from — that’s just the reverse side of bourgeois xenophobia. No, not the Cape. They have his story out of him in no time at all, they interject, play upon it with examples they know of, advice they have to offer, interest that is innocently generous or unwelcome, depends which way the man might take it — but at once, he’s not a ‘garage man’ he’s a friend, one of them, their horizon is broadening all the time.
So that’s where he’s from; one of them knows all about that benighted country. The ‘garage man’ has a university degree in economics there (the university is one nobody’s heard of) but there isn’t a hope in hell (and that place is a hell that, because of god knows what, probably the religious and political factions he did or did not belong to, or lack of money to pay bribes to the right people) he could get an academic appointment. Or a job of any kind, maybe; no work, no development, what can you grow in a desert, corrupt government, religious oppression, cross-border conflict — composite, if inaccurate, of all they think they know about the region, they’re telling him about his country. But then she hears an explanation for something he had said to her she hadn’t understood. He’s telling them: —I can’t say that—‘my country’—because somebody else made a line and said that is it. In my father’s time they gave it to the rich who run it for themselves. So whose country I should say, it’s mine.—
With them, his English is adequate enough and they have not been embarrassed to ask from what mother tongue his accent and locutions come. One of them enquires hopefully of this foreignness, since she has adopted the faith that is a way of life, not a bellicose ethnicity. — Are you a Buddhist?—
— No I am not that.—
And again, he has risen, he has to leave them, he’s a mechanic, he belongs to the manual world of work. One of them ponders, breaking a match over and over. — An economist having to become a grease-monkey. I wonder how he learned that stuff with cars.—
Another had the answer.
— Needs must. The only way to get into countries that don’t want you is as manual labourer or Mafia.—
A week went by. She would never see him again. It happened, among the friends, with the people they picked up: —Where’s that girl you brought along, the one who said she’d been a speech-writer for some cabinet minister who was sacked? — Oh she seems to have left town. — And the other guy — interesting — he wanted to organize street kids as buskers, playing steel drums outside cinemas, did he ever get that off the ground? — No idea where he landed up.—
Two weeks. Of course the man from the garage knew where to find her. He approached the friends’ table on a Saturday morning to tell her he had found a car for her. The garage workshop was closed on Saturdays and now he was wearing well-ironed black jeans, a rose-coloured shirt with a paisley scarf at the neck. They insisted he must have coffee; it was someone’s birthday and the occasion quickly turned the coffee to red wine. He didn’t drink alcohol; he looked at her lifting her glass: I’ve brought the car for you to drive.
And the friends, who were ready to laugh at anything, in their mood, did so clownishly — O-HO-HOHOHO! — assuring him, — Julie has a strong head, not to worry! — But she refused a second glass.
— The cops are out with their breathalysers, it’s the weekend.—
The car was not to her liking — too big, difficult to park— and perhaps it was not meant to be. He had a contact who was on the lookout, he would bring another the next weekend. If that was all right.
First she said she didn’t know if she’d be free; and then she did it, she told him her telephone number. No paper to note it on. The celebration with the friends was still warm upon her, she laughed. Put it on your wrist. And then was embarrassed at her flippancy because he took a ballpoint out of his pocket, turned his wrist face-up, and was writing the number across the delicate skin and the blue veins revealed of himself, there.
He called, brief and formal over the telephone, addressing her as ‘Miss’ with her surname, and the arrangement was for an earlier date, after working hours. That car, again, was not quite right for her. They drove a short way out of town to confirm this. It was as if freed of the city it was not only the road open to them; with her face turned to that road ahead she was able to ask what the friends had touched on— needs must. How does a graduate in economics become a motor mechanic? Wasn’t that quite a long training, apprenticeship and so on? And as he began to speak, she interrupted: Look, I’m Julie, don’t call me anything else.
Julie. Well, Julie. His voice was low although they were alone, on the road, no-one to overhear. He was hesitant, after all, did he really know this girl, her gossiping friends, the loud careless forum of the EL-AY Café; but the desire to confide in her overcame him. He was no qualified mechanic. Luckily for him he had tinkered with cars since he was a small boy, his uncle — mother’s brother — fixed people’s cars and trucks in his backyard … he learnt from him instead of playing with other boys … The garage employs him illegally—’black’, yes that’s the word they use. It’s cheap for the owner; he doesn’t pay accident insurance, pension, medical aid. And now the seldom-granted smile, and this time it rises to the intense, solemn eyes as she turns her glance a moment to him. All the principles of workers’ rights I was taught in my studies.