But he sags back against the rock. He sees now he’s going to have to wait. He can still feel the little stabs in his tail-end. Better to let it pass, otherwise it might come back again. Otherwise maybe it’ll happen in front of Shoprite, next to the stewing-meat sign. That’ll be fucken bad, even worse than here in front of the gates at the rubbish dumps. He sees the kaffirs sitting and looking at him across the road. But they’re sitting with their fingers up in the air. They want a job, that’s all they want. They couldn’t give a shit about him lying here on the other side of the road with a back that feels lame. Why should they? Well, he figures, he’s had some luck with this tsotsi-kaffir. If the kaffir hadn’t helped him, he’d be lying there right now having a fit in the dust. Pissing in his pants, with all the lorries and cars full of people waiting in a queue for him to get finished.
‘Hey,’ he calls out to the kaffir, who’s still standing with his back turned. ‘I mean it, you! You saved my life there, man! Thank you, man. Thanks again very much.’ And then as an afterthought: ‘I owe you one.’
The kaffir turns around.
‘Okay, okay, that’s enough,’ he says. Now he looks the hell in. He sits down next to Lambert. He takes a packet of tobacco out of his back pocket and rolls a cigarette. Then he shakes a few green crumbs from a matchbox into the tobacco.
Dagga, Lambert thinks. This kaffir actually thinks he can sit here and smoke a joint in front of him, a white man!
The kaffir makes the joint with his long, thin fingers. He licks the paper. He’s concentrating hard. You can see he’s been rolling joints for a long time. He folds the paper into a cigarette shape, twisting one end closed. Then he smooths the joint nicely with his fingers, pressing them together like a nozzle. He’s got two long nails on one hand. The kaffir lights up and takes a deep pull. He offers Lambert the joint. Lambert shakes his head. No thanks. The kaffir shrugs and looks the other way.
He stares at the kaffir who’s looking the other way. This is one cheeky fucken kaffir, he thinks. How does he know Lambert won’t go and report him to the police? How does he know he isn’t a policeman himself? He thinks about this. No, he reckons he doesn’t look like a policeman. He checks out the kaffir again. The kaffir looks like he’s forgotten about him. He’s looking into the street, now this way, now that way. He’s looking at what’s coming. He smokes his joint so hard the smoke floats around his head in clouds. He wishes the kaffir would take off those sunglasses, ’cause he doesn’t know where to look when he looks at him. All he sees there is his own reflection. He feels the kaffir can see him better than he can see the kaffir. This is not a scared kaffir, he decides. This kaffir isn’t afraid of anything. He’s an okay kaffir, this.
‘I’ll take a pull now, thank you,’ he says. Why not? He’s sitting here on his backside, anyway, at the entrance to the rubbish dumps.
‘Sure, man, sure,’ the kaffir says. He passes him the stub.
Lambert takes a pull. He just hopes this kaffir hasn’t got germs. But so what, anyway. He, Lambert, is not always so clean himself. The joint makes him cough.
‘Easy,’ the kaffir says to him. ‘Easy now, my bra,’ he says, and Lambert feels how he smiles, right through the dagga smoke, back at the kaffir, as they sit there, across the road, in front of the gates of the rubbish dump. And he sees how the kaffir smiles back at him. And he, Lambert, smiles even more. And the kaffir too, all you see are teeth. Then the kaffir starts laughing. He takes the joint that Lambert’s handing back to him and he laughs and coughs and he smacks Lambert on the back so hard that he starts hiccuping. And then Lambert laughs and pushes the kaffir who’s laughing at him with his shoulder, and the kaffir loses his balance. He falls over on to the grass, on his elbow.
‘Hey, man!’ says the kaffir as he props himself up again.
‘I say, man!’ he says. ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’
‘Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!’ he and the kaffir laugh, there under the trees, next to the rocks, in front of the gates of the rubbish dump. They laugh so much they start crying. And when they’ve almost finished laughing, he says: ‘So now, what’s your name, hey?’
‘Ooooh!’ says the kaffir. ‘I’ve got many, many names. One for every occasion. But to you, my friend, I’m Sonnyboy, just Sonnyboy, plain and simple. And what’s your name?’
‘Lambert,’ he says, ‘Lambertus Benade.’
And then he feels himself offering the kaffir his hand. Ja, can you believe it? And the kaffir smiles at him from behind his reflectors, and Lambert sees in the reflectors how he smiles back at the kaffir. And then the kaffir takes his hand. He shakes Lambert’s big, knobbly hand. He half lets go of Lambert’s hand and then he swivels his own hand, grabbing hold of Lambert’s thick thumb. Lambert gropes to get hold of the kaffir’s thumb, and when he does get a grip on it, a thin little thumb, the kaffir suddenly lets go and turns his hand straight again. Lambert gropes for the kaffir’s hand until he gets hold of it again. And then he gives it a good shake.
Now they really start laughing. They sit there and clutch their stomachs, they’re laughing so much. They smack their legs to help them get all the laughter out. They make grabbing movements in the air to show how they missed each other’s hands, and then they laugh so much they fall to the ground. There by the rocks, under the trees, across the road from the Martindale rubbish dumps.
‘So now, where do you live, man?’ the kaffir asks when the laughing dies down a bit.
‘Just there, the other side, in Triomf,’ he shows with his hand.
‘Triomf,’ says the kaffir.
‘Yes, Triumph,’ he translates for the kaffir.
‘Triumph, I see,’ says the kaffir, and he gives a little laugh.
‘And you,’ he says, ‘where do you live?’
‘Me? Ho, ho, here, there, everywhere. Sonnyboy pola everywhere,’ says the kaffir.
‘I see,’ he says. And then, after a while: ‘A rambling rose.’
Then they laugh some more.
‘I mean, where do you come from?’ he asks next.
‘What do you reckon, my mate?’ says the kaffir, smiling.
‘Well, um, it’s hard to say,’ he says.
‘How come, hey?’ says the kaffir. ‘You’re supposed to be able to tell just by looking at me, hey, boss?’
‘Um, it’s not so easy,’ he says.
‘No, now you must please explain, my man, ’cause I’m just a damn kaffir.’
He knows he’s being teased. But he doesn’t mind. This kaffir’s his pal. He likes him.
‘Well, you’re too yellow,’ he says, ‘and you don’t talk like a kaffir. Maybe you’re just a Hotnot.’
‘Hear, hear!’ says Sonnyboy. ‘This whitey can’t classify me!’ He leans over to Lambert as if he wants to tell him a secret.
‘Look, that’s how the dice fell for me here in Jo’burg. I’m a Xhosa, I come from the Transkei, and some of us are yellow.’ He touches his face. ‘That’s why the bladdy Bushmen thought I was one of them, so I got a room in Bosmont right in among them. And they began talking real Coloured Afrikaans to me. So I got the hang of it on the sly, and I didn’t say nothing, ’cause the less a Bushman knows about you, the better. It’s a bad scene, the Bushman scene. They drink themselves stupid and then they rob and stab you and leave you for dead …’ Suddenly Sonnyboy sounds different. He shifts even closer to Lambert.
‘Now listen to me, brother.’ From behind the rocks he pulls out a pink bag with a zip and handles. ‘Don’t you want to buy something from a rambling rose? I need the money, man. I haven’t got a job. I live by my wits, you could say. I’m hungry, man. I haven’t eaten fucken nothing for three days, man.’
‘Shame,’ Lambert says. ‘That’s bad.’