Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

There were grinning faces around him, smiling faces of the Black doorman and the suitcase boy. He was led across the ornate hotel lobby, past the jewellery and curio shops, to the front desk. He wondered what they would have to say about the supreme penalty and the Pritchard Five. He filled in the registration form. He reckoned that he was thirty miles from Pretoria Central prison.

•**

As soon as he walked into the room Jeez recognised the colonel.

Sergeant Oosthuizen had brought Jeez from his cell to the visit. He had known there was something extraordinary when they had walked on past the line of doors for C section's visit rooms, and on into the administration block. He had not been back in that block since his first day at Beverly Hills.

Jeez stared from the door into the colonel's face.

Jeez had been through the Spac labour camp and before that through the investigation centre in Tirana. Only the thought of being hanged frightened him. The sight of the colonel did not make him afraid.

The colonel's empire was the interrogation floor of John Vorster Square police station in Johannesburg.

On the tenth floor where he ruled, the gaze of the colonel was reckoned to buckle a man's knees, a Black man's or a White man's, to make water of his bowels. The colonel never hit a prisoner, he was always out of the room by the time that a prisoner was stripped, was gasping, was screaming.

The colonel ordered what happened to the prisoners. The servants of his empire were the captains and the lieutenants and the warrant officers of the security police.

Jeez knew the colonel. An old acquaintance.

Jeez had never given him anything. Each time that the colonel had come back into the interrogation rooms of John Vorster Square after the beating, when the torturers were panting from their work, Jeez had stayed silent.

"I hate you, all you White bastard commies. I want to kill you White filth. I want to shoot you with my own gun."

Jeez could remember the straining red blotched face as the colonel had shouted at him, early in the days of John Vorster Square. The colonel, with his retinue of phone-tappers, searchers, tailers, letter openers, frighteners, had screamed at him through the spittle. Jeez reckoned he'd given up early. Jeez reckoned the colonel had given up on this one prisoner when he had realised he was fighting a losing battle, and he hated to be close to failure.

The colonel was Jeez's "visit".

The colonel and his warrant officer. Jeez knew the W.O.

He had done time on Jeez at John Vorster Square, hand slaps and punches, and twice the boot. He had started in on Jeez as soon as the colonel had gone back to his office. Jeez had heard in the basement cells of the Pretoria court house, when he was locked in with Happy and Charlie and Percy and Tom, that it was the W.O. who had got Percy talking first, and Tom second, and then Charlie and Happy. They had all been softened by the W.O. and then made their voluntary statements to the colonel.

They were in a senior officer's room. There was a glass-topped desk and comfortable chairs and vase of flowers on a shelf over the radiator and a photograph of the State President on the wall and curtains. Jeez hadn't known that such a room existed inside Beverly Hills. The door closed behind him. Jeez looked round. Oosthuizen had gone. He was alone with the colonel in his slacks and his blazer, and the W.O. in his lightweight suit. Both sitting, relaxed, as if they'd enjoyed a good lunch.

"I am a convicted prisoner, sir," Jeez said firmly. "I do not have to submit to further police interrogation."

The colonel smiled, bending the line of his snipped brush moustache. "Who said anything about interrogation, Carew?"

"Sir, I would like to go back to my cell."

"You're jumping the gun, man. I'm not here to ask questions."

He would have seemed a slight, frail figure to them. Jeez thought that the W.O. would have dearly liked him to raise a fist to the colonel, would have enjoyed beating the hell out of him.

"We wanted to have a talk with you, Carew. We wanted to see if we could be of help to you."

An old trick that Jeez had taught himself in Spac, with the real bastards among the interrogators. Take away the uniform, strip off the shirt and vest and socks and boots.

See them only in their underpants. See a menacing man in his underwear, see his hanging white belly and his spindly legs, see him without the uniform that makes for fear, creates authority. His mind gave him the picture of the colonel in his underpants. He stared back at the colonel.

Eyes meeting, neither man turning away.

"Has the governor seen you today, Carew?"

"No, sir."

"You haven't been told of the State President's decision regarding clemency for you?"

"No, sir."

The colonel turned slowly to his warrant officer. "You'd have thought Carew would have been told, with it on the radio and all that."

"Too right, Colonel."

They were winding him up, Jeez knew that, turning the screw. He stood his ground. He listened to the silence in the room. There would have been a conspiracy between the colonel and the governor, news to be kept from Carew in order that the condemned man might prove more pliable to the colonel of security police.

"I'm very surprised that you haven't been told, Carew."

He bit on his lip.

"When a man's been here thirteen months, waiting to know whether he's going to hang, you'd have thought he'd be told which way it's going for him."

"You'd have thought that, Colonel." The echo from the warrant officer.

Jeez imagined the hot sweating hair on the gut of the colonel, and the pig-bladder bulge of his belly, the milk white matchstick legs.

"You want to know what the State President has decided, Carew?"

There was an ache of pain in Jeez's lips. He thought the skin must be near to breaking. The colonel's voice hardened.

"You are an impertinent little swine, Carew, and not for much longer. You are going to hang, Carew. That's the State President's decision… "

Jeez felt the skin open. There was the warmth of the trickle of blood heading for the point of his chin.

"You're going to hang, Carew, hang by the neck until you are dead. You are going to hang through the due process of law. You can be impertinent for two more weeks, and then you hang."

He tried to see the men at Century, the men on his team.

He tried to find the image in his mind of when he had come back from the clinic and they had taken him down to the pub behind Victoria railway station and made him pie-eyed, and made him talk about the conditions in Spac. They couldn't have acted the way they hung on his words, Lennie, and Adrian and Henry, the way the eyes of the youngsters they'd brought along shone with admiration. What was the length of Century's bloody arm? Couldn't be true, that the team couldn't reach him.

"You have been an enigma to me, Carew. I'll admit to you that we know very little about you, but look at the way you're standing, man. You're standing like a soldier. I don't know which army, I don't know when, but you've been a soldier and served your country. Look at you today, man, you stand your ground because you've got guts. But where i s having gut staking you? T o the rope, and anmarked grave.

"Carew, there is nothing about you, that I know of, that gives me an idea of why you should be associated with Black terrorism, but it is that association that is going to hang you.

Do you think those Blacks of the A.N.C. care about you?

They care shit all for you. They used you and they dropped you right in it. You know, Carew, there have been some protests in Europe about these death sentences, pretty pitiful protests, and y o u r name's not mentioned. You know that?

All the talk is of Zikala and Schoba and Ngoye and Mweshtu.