Читать книгу The Fall - Jen Thorpe - Страница 7

Helen

‘It’s hard to be an original protestor, but it’s not difficult to think you are one. I see these students, day in and day out, thinking they’re the first to fight power and have a fist full of “democracy” shoved down their throats. I’ve been covering this type of thing for years and it never seems to change. The images might, the faces can, but the actual process almost feels linear to me these days. You start fierce; you end fatigued.’

Catching a glance of myself in the bar-side mirror, I realise that I’m one to talk. If anyone looks exhausted, it’s me. My hair is a mess and my complexion is puffy from too many takeaways. I look down to avoid my exhausted gaze and notice last night’s veggie korma smeared all over my pants.

‘So you don’t think they’ll win?’

‘I don’t know; I don’t know what winning is. I’m too tired to care.’

‘Well, you may feel tired, but you look just fine to me, doll.’

‘Oh, John, I’m far too old to be called somebody’s doll.’

Still, it’s nice that the twenty-year-old barman understands the age-old tradition of barkeeping – unsolicited compliments and a steady stream of service.

‘What was I saying? Oh, yes. Democracy doesn’t fill you up. It’s not going to feed you or cuddle you at night. It makes you restless and it makes you believe you can change things. So, you think you’ll make a change and you take the space given by democracy and use it. Then democracy shuts you the shit down. According to the democratic laws, of course. It’s all very orderly and polite.’

John keeps polishing the glasses. This probably isn’t the right audience, given that he’s likely to be studying here himself.

If I looked as slick as Thuli, I bet he’d keep listening. She’s hard to ignore with her big eyes, red lips and wild hair. Me, I’m more of a sepia, a brown tone fading into the shadows.

I’ve been doing this job too long. Seen too many countries trying to walk as infant democracies and stumbling instead, as they must. I open my notebook to the first empty page, making a doodle list of all the countries I’ve been to since I started doing this. I notice another list on the previous page, full of things to sort out at home:

groceries, a cleaning lady, phone cousin Roberta, sort out recycling/a bokashi bin, pack away Steve’s things …

This is not the time or place to be thinking about that. I’m on the job.

I’ve lost my sense of subtlety. How many shades of revolution are there? I bet it’s fewer than fifty. I suppose South Africa felt different to all of us. It all seemed miraculous and, with Mandela at the helm, that magic felt permanent. But he’s gone now, Tutu’s not going to be around forever, and the fairy dust has long settled. Now we have to live with the grim reality of a half-fulfilled promise. Maybe it wasn’t fairy dust at all – just the ash from a smouldering fire.

‘The worst thing is that it’s not even you guys who received the promises. It was your parents. You’re just the vessels for the dreams and goals of another generation that were never realised. Before you were born, your parents committed you to the duty of living the dream. It’s a burden.’

He shrugs, and runs his fingers through his sun-streaked hair.

‘So far the dream hasn’t been so bad for me. I mean, I’m white and I have a black girlfriend. We’ve been dating since high school.’

Oh, John. Where to start?

These young faces I photograph every day are carrying the weight of a rainbow on their shoulders. John might not feel that way, but I’d hazard a guess that he’s not here on some giant student loan if he can afford to be working in the university pub while his peers are out there on the steps in an angry protest. I guess privilege is the blindness that comes from being able to switch on and off your concern about an issue.

For the others, there is no space for uncertainty. They know that if they don’t get the education that was stolen from their families, the paths for them are limited. They know that more than half the people their age are unemployed. They know that half of them are not even looking for a job any more. But at least they’re free, right? And at least the bullets are rubber.

‘You know …’ Am I going to say it? I am. ‘Back in my day, when I was at varsity, it was none of this rubber bullet show. Those bullets were real and you had to mind out of the bloody way, please and thank you.’

‘Whoa, sounds hectic. Did you, like, ever get shot?’

I shake my head. Some police shot to kill and some to miss, and I suppose that is the same these days. But now it seems more perverse because the government is supposed to be ‘on our side’. The lines between the powerful and the people are less clear. The police themselves must have children, surely? Can they afford the fees on their meagre salaries? Sometimes the juxtaposition of these police with those of apartheid is too painful to process. Sometimes I think I’m just another white person who doesn’t get the details and is painting this all with the same brush, so I can separate myself from it. Not my circus.

But I have a creeping feeling that, even though I’ve seen this all before, for more years than I would care to admit and in more places than my heart can safely remember, something is off here. It has taken me more than the usual chamomile tea to get to sleep this past week. Something is different about what’s happening. I’m just not sure what. That not knowing is what’s freaking me out. It’s what made me come down to the bar, a place I know I shouldn’t be.

‘Do you feel like this protest is … I don’t know … different?’

‘I don’t know. It’s my first one,’ John says without irony from beneath the bar where he’s stacking glasses that he’s just polished onto sticky plastic mats laced with years of cheap beer and wine.

Thuli tried to convince me that she could time travel. Maybe she was just having a bad trip, though I’ve seen plenty of those and she seemed lucid. Can’t have been, though. You don’t even know what these kids are on to be out here at the front line. Weed? Tik? Something worse? I’m too old to know what the cool drugs are any more.

‘Hey, John, what are the cool drugs these days? What are the kids taking?’

‘I can’t say that I’d know that.’

He gives me a grin, all young skin and dimples, a grin that leads me to believe he’s not being completely honest with me. I’ve got too old for young people to talk about their drugs in front of me. That is depressing.

Depression. Maybe that’s what it is with Thuli. Depression or trauma can cause flashbacks and hallucinations too. That’s a possibility. She did say that something set her ‘glitching’ off; maybe she’s just one of the many women who didn’t get to make it through their youth without their uncle forcing himself on them. Jesus. I am jaded. Maybe I’m the traumatised one.

‘A gin, bartender, better make it a double.’

‘Sorry, Mrs … Helen. I’m going to politely remind you that you asked me not to serve you any alcohol, even if you asked nicely.’

‘Did I come here for you to judge me, John?’

‘I doubt that. But what about a nice pot of Ceylon?’

‘Fine. Better put two teabags in, and I want the fancy sugar from the back. Not these stupid paper sachets.’

I should be drinking in a campus coffee shop but none of those are open because of the protests. The university bar, though, it knows that protests mean big business. Everyone needs a stiff drink after a day of shouting about inequality.

What I’d do to have a drink, or maybe what I’d do to have never been a drunk in the first place is a more accurate description. Years sober doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re counting them in minutes like I’ve been these last few days.

Two years ago, booze felt like a healing pool for my grief. I bathed myself in it, was weightless on the bubbles of champagne and cleansed by the coolness of Stolichnaya. I convinced myself I could survive that way. I did survive. Just.

I turn to a new page in my notebook and start a list of all the things I’m grateful for like Sally told me to do. Hippie bullshit. All I can think to write is ‘tea’. That has to be the saddest gratitude list I’ve ever read. I bet even Oprah would struggle to praise this one.

I’m sitting in a bar grateful for a man who won’t do his job and serve me a drink. Not even one. Just one. Though it never is just one. I can’t afford to drink and I can’t afford to speculate about every crazy story I hear from tripping kids at protests. Both would bankrupt me, and I need to make sure that I impress Sally. She’s given me this second chance, after all.

John places my teapot next to me, two teabag strings dangling out the side. Next, he places a mug on a chipped saucer, and slides over a bowl full of dark sticky sugar.

‘It’s on the house, Helen. You look like you need it. Don’t work so hard.’

A young man is buying me pity tea. Next thing they’ll be helping me cross the street. Still, I take a sip and do feel relieved. Good Ceylon tea. Now that’s one thing that wretched bunch of colonials got right. If not for Cecil, what would I be drinking? Then again, if not for Cecil, would we even be in this mess?

I can’t believe that ugly statue covered in pigeon poo started all of this. If the university hadn’t been so stubborn about it, the kids would have moved on victorious. But no, history trumped present concerns as it is wont to do, and so now we have a riot on our hands and police up to our eyeballs. Soon they’ll call in the army, if that’s not only allowed for the State of the Nation Address. Statues may fall, but their shadows last a lot longer.

Shit is too fucked up here to think about it bit by bit. It’s much easier to cope with if you think of it as a big mess, rather than a series of small painful ones.

But what is the big picture this time? Something is amiss, nagging at my brain, the type of thought that will wake you up in the night. I’ve been sitting here trying to jot down exactly what it is and I keep coming back to the police. New page, new list.

The police seem different.

‘Wow, Helen, you’re really making headlines,’ I mumble to myself.

Of course they’re different. Since 2012 those cops on the ground know it’ll be them who get blamed if there’s a massacre, not the people telling them to execute it.

They have a deadness in their eyes.

Normally, especially on a protest day, you can sense a gravitas – the glimmer of panic in their eyes because they’re either adrenalin-fatigued or high on the power. But these new cops don’t even flinch when I take the pictures.

They don’t even blink.

Holy shit.

‘Hey, John?’

‘Yes?’

‘Have you seen these latest public order cops blinking?’

He rolls his eyes at me behind the bar, but this time he’s leaning towards the mirror enough for me to see him do it.

‘Don’t roll your eyes at me, young man. I’m serious.’

‘I think that tea’s getting a bit too strong for you. We’re going to have to go back to one teabag if you keep this up.’

Am I losing it? I wish Steve were still around. He always had a nose for the distinction between roses and the bullshit that fertilises them. Eight years of wishing can’t bring someone back from the dead, though. I’ve tried.

Glitching? What was Thuli even talking about? Far as I know, time travel is as real now as it was in Back to the Future. The whole premise of her dream or hallucination or whatever it was doesn’t make sense. Taking out one youngster isn’t going to stop this movement. The government can’t be stupid enough to think that; they’d have to do more.

Still, that Hector kid, he’s been at the helm of things for a good while now. It would be in the interests of the state to be free of him. It might make people too scared to come out to the protests if he were shot. On the other hand, it might make the movement bigger, especially if it’s obvious it was government who’d ordered the shooting. I suppose I’d better stop speculating and get back out there. I leave money on the counter as an indication to John that I will not accept free tea like a pensioner.

I walk from the bar in the direction Thuli suggested the hit might take place. It’s pretty far from the buildings right at the top of campus, and walking towards the action up there looking up, I can’t see many places where a sniper might stand. Even if there were a sniper, he’d have to get past all these kids in order to get up there, which is possible but not likely.

The campus is built like a series of platforms. First a parking lot, then some steep concrete steps around a flat and accessible plaza, then more steps up to the actual hall. You’d have to have a powerful rifle or a fantastic eye even to get close to hitting someone at this distance. In the crowds it would be almost impossible. I suppose that’s the point of a sniper, but it doesn’t make me feel any more convinced that it’s realistic.

To me there seem to be too many entry and exit points. At the first sound of a shot, the kids would scatter, and there are thousands of them. Whoever was shooting wouldn’t be able to be sure that it was Hector they’d get.

Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they want the instability.

‘Is that what this is – state-sponsored terrorism?’

A student looks at me, the crazy overweight middle-aged white lady in shitty old clothes, mumbling to herself. Among all these revolutionary fashionistas I feel even more frumpy than usual. I must look like what they’d call ‘a hot mess’.

I’d probably be less sceptical of Thuli’s story if I believed our cops could arrange something like this in the state they’re in. A murder like this would require planning, skill and expertise. Our cops struggle to stick to the ‘stomach in, chest out’ nonsense. Expecting them to be able to plot and organise state-sponsored terror seems to be a bit of a push. Still, an ill-planned execution is even more terrifying than a well-planned one. It would be a disaster. But not one worth worrying about based on the ramblings of someone who believes she can time travel.

My phone rings like Sally knows I’m not concentrating on the job at hand.

‘What’s happening there?’

‘Nice to hear from you too, Sal. I’m fine thanks, and you?’

‘Helen, I’m watching this on TV and it looks like a picnic, not a protest. I think you should come back to the office. We just got word of a presidential—’

‘Sal, just be patient; I think things are going to heat up here. Trust me.’

She’s too new on the job to recognise the calm before the storm. God, I miss Steve. Always, but right now in particular.

‘Helen, there are other stories to cover. Get your butt back to head office in an hour.’

‘But, Sally—’

She’s gone before I can explain that sometimes you have to trust your gut, that when a time-travelling barely post-teen tells you there’s going to be a murder, the least you can do is stick around and investigate it. I don’t have the room to disobey her though, not after she’s cut me so much slack.

I snap a few pictures of the building and the cement slab, wondering whether any of what Thuli said could happen, then walk back down to my car.