Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

"Your shopping, sir. Very heavy, sir."

He had it on his tongue to say there was no shopping to be delivered. The heavy parcel was bending the kid's shoulder. He bit off the denial. He gave the bellboy a tip.

He closed the door. He carried the Checkers bag to his bed, laid it down. He lifted out the second bag that was inside, that stank. He carried a chair to the door and lodged it under the doorknob. He opened the window wider.

He opened the second bag.

He sneezed.

His head rocked back, couldn't help himself. He lifted the shopping bag into the bathroom and spread out yesterday's Star on the floor, and gently opened the black plastic.

He stripped off a cooking foil wrap.

The explosive was in three piles, layer upon layer of half inch thick quarter pound slabs. He could tell it was fresh, the greasepaper on each slab was firm. He thought it would be plaster gelatine, couldn't tell from the print on the wraps.

The writing was in Cyrillic…

He had liked Thiroko, but he hadn't known how much he trusted him. I love you, Jacob Thiroko. Listen to your radio. Wherever you are, keep your finger on the tuner button, keep following the news bulletins. Keep your ear to the seat, Mr Thiroko.

… There was a small jiffy bag, cut off and the top stapled down to half size. Gently, he pulled it open. He found four small pinched bundles of cottonwool with Sellotape binding. He prised one open. He extracted the gleaming detonator. There were lengths of wire. One roll would be the Russian-made equivalent of Cordtex, and the other their own safety fuse. From the thickness he thought he could tell which.

He could smell the explosive. The sickly scent of almond sweets. Like the marzipan under the icing on his mother's Christmas cake, and on the cakes she made for his birthdays, when there was just the two of them, when she had been without a husband and he without a father. He replaced each layer of wrapping as neatly as he could, then brought out his underarm deodorant canister. He sprayed over the package, then opened the bathroom windows to let in the sounds of the traffic below, to let out the scent of his spray and the scent of almonds. He put the package into his suitcase, locked it, returned it to the bottom of the hanging cupboard.

Jack sat on his bed and drew up a shopping list.

A grip bag, a ten-litre can, a roll of heavy adhesive tape, a pair of washing-up gloves, a packet of 1.5 volt torch batteries, electrical flex, a watch, a litre of two stroke oil, nine litres of petrol.

He had tidied his room. He had sprayed again with his deodorant.

He had made up his mind. He was on the road, far on the road.

Jack Curwen went shopping on a sunny Johannesburg afternoon.

An everyday afternoon at John Vorster Square.

The army of prisoners whiled away the hours in the half basement cells of the east wing, some under investigation, some in detention, some criminal and some political.

The hard everyday afternoons were reserved for the politicals. The criminals were just tsotsis, the hooligans, the thieves of the townships. The criminals made only a slight impact on the smooth running of the state's apparatus. The politicals needed breaking, putting in court, locking away. The politicals threatened the state's apparatus.

Bars dominated the east wing cell blocks. Bars across the windows, bars across the corridors, bars across the light wells. A filthy place where the prisoner is dehumanised, where he cannot believe that anyone cares about his fate. A place where the grime of years coats the cell floors and walls.

Where the graffiti is of despair. Since the state of emergency on the East Rand the prisoners had been brought in their hundreds to John Vorster Square. Many Blacks and a few Whites. The elderly and the schoolchildren, the community workers and the trade unionists, the revolutionaries and those registered by computer error or an informer's malice on the police records. Better to be a robber of banks than to have publicly denounced as "mere tinkering with apartheid" the State President's package of reforms. Better to have mugged the migrant workers in the shadows outside their township hostels when they have wages and are drunk, than to have protested on the streets the right to vote.

The politicals were the targets of the security police working on the upper floors of the south wing of John Vorster Square. Pleasant offices, airy and light behind the plate glass windows, but in their interrogation rooms the air and the light could be cut with the dropping of blinds.

The security police at John Vorster Square were good at their work. A White Methodist priest once held in John Vorster Square had written afterwards of the "decrepit doci-lity of despair" that cowed the Blacks in the townships. The policemen exploited that despair in the interrogation rooms, they found little resilience in those they questioned. Even the comrades of the Umkonto we Sizwe condemned themselves in their statements given on the ioth floor. Happy Zikala and Charlie Schoba and Percy Ngoye and Tom Mweshtu had made their statements here, gathered the noose closer to their necks here. All the Whites, those who talked and those who stayed silent, those with the privilege of third level education, those who were active in the cadres, would speak of the expertise of the security police on the ioth floor.

Most cracked.

Jeez hadn't. He was a rare exception.

And Jeez was now little more than a faded statistic in the hand-written ledgers of John Vorster Square, remembered only by a very few.

The colonel was principal amongst the few.

The instruments of his power were the Terrorism Act, No. 83 (1967) with a minimum sentence of five years and a maximum of death – the General Law Amendment Act, No.

76 (1962) Section 21, also five years to death – the Internal Security Act, No. 79 (1976) giving the power of preventive detention and banning orders. There were not many prisoners, politicals, who did not feel the sliding bowel weakness and the tickle of terror when they stood in the presence of the colonel.

He would have described himself as a patriot. He would have said that every action he undertook in John Vorster Square was for the benefit of his beloved South Africa. He would have said that he stood in the front line of the battle against the contagion of communism and the drift to anarchy.

On that everyday afternoon, the colonel watched with grudging satisfaction as a full time clerk of F.O.S.A.T.U. made a voluntary statement. Small beer, a Coloured, an insignificant creature, admitting to handing out leaflets demanding the release of political prisoners. With the vermin's own guilt tied down, the work might begin of extracting information from him on more senior members of the Federation of South African Trade Unions. He would be charged under the Terrorism Act. They could do for the clerk under "activities likely to endanger the maintenance of law and order", or they could do for him under "activities likely to cause embarrassment to the administration of the affairs of state". They had him by the throat, they had his confession, and now they could bargain the length of his sentence against the incrimination of the leaders of F.O.S.A.T.U. It was the leaders that the colonel wanted, not this rodent.

The clerk sat at the table and dictated a stuttering statement to a White corporal. He was watched by the colonel who stood in the doorway.

The journey to Pretoria was a sore in the colonel's mind.

He did not comprehend how a White preferred to hang rather than to come clean about the Blacks with whom he had collaborated. The visit to Beverly Hills had been a failure. He would happily have hanged James Carew himself to have expurgated that failure. He was no fool, he could rationalise his failure. He supposed that he had failed with Carew because he was unaccustomed to interrogating White politicals. One or two a year came into his domain on the top floors of John Vorster Square. Some he categorised as dedicated communists, some were gripped with the martyr wish, some he regarded as mentally deranged, some were all three. All of them he thought stupid. To suffer in the cause of Black freedom was idiotic. Carew was outside his categories, a mystery. He thought he hated the man which was why in this same room he had lost his temper, shouted.