There’s a young couple dozing under a blanket to my right. They have their hands buried between each other’s thighs and are breathing heavily. Luvuyo nudges me as he walks past and points at them with a grin. Naaiers, he says, sitting down in the seat behind me.
I grin. I guess I wish myself the best, too. I wish Luvuyo the same. Leaning back, I close my eyes before we start moving. The trip is fifteen hours long, they say, and our journey will push us across a thousand kilometers of our country. Luvuyo and I have been told everything we need to know. We’ll return from this journey as new men, they said.
We do. Three weeks later my family has a small celebration for us back home, in eMthatha, and after umgidi wethu, we make it back to Du Noon in early January. For a while, Luvuyo and I hang around the neighborhood, wearing our uniform and doing the rounds to meet with other guys who’ve just come out. It isn’t the way it used to be, everyone complains. You get men as young as fourteen, now, and they bring guns into the circles we open to greet one another, pressing amakrwala for buttons and brandy. We give it two weeks before we decide it isn’t worth the hassle, or maybe even the risk. I change out of my blazer and newsboy cap and wonder how much I could hawk them for.
Towards the end of the month Luvuyo takes a taxi out of Du Noon, but I decide to stick around for a while. I take Industrial when everyone’s out, and then I start walking the neighborhood on my own, asking around for anyone who might have work. In the end, I take a job at a spaza. It’s in a double container just around the corner from Bhut’ Vuyo’s, a place popular for pushing out cigarettes and five-rand airtime. It isn’t anything serious. It keeps my shoulders above water when we reach the end of the month. I split myself between the cleaning and the selling, and sometimes I’ll go behind the counter and take a look at my boss’s books; I’ll do a few numbers for her.
There’s a lot of kids who pass by the shop. Most of them get sent from home to buy bread, airtime, or bleach — household items for their overworked mothers. These laaities like to act smooth if you let them. They’ll bring a half-loaf down to a quarter and then burn the change on entjies and rolling paper. Sometimes I serve them and other times I don’t. It depends on the kind of day I’m having when I get on my shift. I serve their older brothers, too — guys who come from my block and the ones next to ours. They lope up to my container with a million-rand scheme burning out of their eyes, each with a plan to turn Du Noon on its head. They ask me for deodorant and cigarettes, mostly, and I slide them packets of free condoms too. My boss used to be a school teacher; she makes us do that if we have them around.
Sometimes, one of the guys will pocket the jackets and hang around the store for a while, waiting for me to get off my shift. We’ll dap an entjie outside the container and he’ll tell me to come around to the corner for quarts, and that it’s been a while since the ous saw me playing pool at Ta Ace’s. If I’m off the next day, I’ll tag along with him. I’ll drop the keys on the counter and ignore my boss’s glares, her warnings. We’ll take the main road, most of the time, and go past the inn, where the taxis crank their bass so high they could move the walls of a thousand houses backwards; and it’s at times like these, with the evening sky tinted the bright color of a new coal fire, that things seem possible, even for us down here.
Then one day, without any warning, I remember the man we once met on that cold night in Mowbray; I remember Monsieur Paré and the mask he wore on the day the three of us, Ruan, Cecelia and I, took our seats with him. It happens on a wet, gray morning, and when I think of him, I think of his daughter, Ethelia, as well.
Friday shifts are the longest at the shop, so I always make sure to take down two cigarettes on the way, just to keep the tar from rising up to my face. Today, I smoke the first one on Bhengu, and when I cross over to Eagle Street, passing by a pack of school children who climb, one after the other, into the doors of a peeling Hi-Ace, I hear the first noises from the mob. I nod at the driver as I pass, one of Ta T-Man’s new men, and when I take the corner into Nomzamo, my eyes smart and the wind stings when it flows into my throat. It’s cold and scented with motor oil; heavy with the smell of burning rubber. Maybe there’s been another strike, I think, but when I look around, no one seems torpid enough to be off the clock.
I keep walking.
I find the crowd a block away from my job; a small mob of around twenty people, and when I get closer, I hear them shouting over each other, hurling accusations about a pyramid scheme and talking about a man who’ll later remind me of Paré. In the crowd, a few people hold up election posters. They’ve ripped them down from the containers which fortify the front end of Du Noon, at the beginning of Dumani Street, and the faces of the politicians have been blanked out with white paint. In the center of the mob, they have the offender sprawled on the ground. He looks no older than eighteen. Two tires smolder behind him in a small stack, the cause of the heady stink in the air. Three women, standing to my right and in front of an old man in stained overalls, say the boy was trying to torch the neighborhood, and that only a month ago he’d stolen money from Du Noon’s pensioners, selling them a pyramid scheme called The Golden Fowl.
I nod, feeling I’ve got the gist of it.
Then I push myself deeper into the crowd and see him curled up on his side. He’s a small man, wearing nothing but a light-green vest — something they say he lifted from the clothesline behind him. Turning over on his side, he starts to laugh, spitting into the ground and turning a clot of it into mud under his chin. He addresses the crowd at the same time, shouting about the coming of a man without a face. The crowd falls silent and we listen. He sinks his nails into the earth, digs up a fistful of soil, and hurls it over his head. He says we’ll no longer be slaves, when the faceless man comes. Then he releases a stream of urine into the dust, and that’s when they drive the first shopping trolley into his flank, scraping him across the earth. The women in front of me tell the men to go easy on him: to only teach the boy a lesson. Ligeza eli, they say, a madman, and then they tell the men to dress him in clothes after they’re done. The men, themselves not much older than the offender, laugh, but agree to do so.
Then most of us turn back to our jobs. When I tell my boss what’s happened in the street outside, she just grunts. Her eyes remain unmoved, her reading glasses fixed on the numbers in her book.
Look at where you are, she says, waving a hand at me. Then tell me what you find surprising about this.
I don’t know how to respond, so I shrug. Then I crack my knuckles and take my place at her counter.
Not much, I say in the end, to her as well as myself.
I push an empty Kiwi shoe-polish tin under the stool to keep it from rocking. Through the doorway, I watch the rutted road die once more, before it comes back to life with our customers at lunchtime.
+ + +
Time manages to pass after that, but I can’t help thinking about it: all the things I heard and saw that day. Later, after they’d beaten up the offender — his name was Siseko — they told him to go home, but he hung around our neighborhood instead, walking the streets and taking long laps from Siya to Curry Street, holding conversations with himself about the man and his coming.