Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

After the lecture, managing almost a bounce in his crippled stride, he made for his locker. There was no message for him.

•**

Frikkie de Kok liked a drink, and he liked to talk. There were few men he could drink with because his working life was his secret, a matter that put him apart from other men. His assistant was his natural drinking partner, on Wednesdays in the late afternoon and early evening, if they did not have to be out of their beds while it was still dark on the following morning. Frikkie de Kok liked the Harlequin Club for his drinking and the chance to watch a rugby match from the old dark wood long bar. He had a small circle of acquaintances amongst the solicitors and barristers and government servants and accountants who patronised the bar on their way home from work.

His place was a corner table against the wall and the window, where he could talk to the man who would succeed him on his retirement. Where, also, he could watch the match.

He gave all he knew to his assistant.

He thought that was the least he could do for this young man who was so keen to learn. He had decided when the time would be, very soon, that he would allow his assistant to take over the full role of judging the length of the rope to be used, of fitting the pinions and the hood, of handling the lever. He reckoned that an assistant had to be given a chance to learn for himself. Not for a multiple of course, but for a single execution, and as long as they had no reason to think that the man would not go quietly… probably be best if it were a Coloured, that's what he thought, because in Frikkie de Kok's experience, the Coloureds were usually no trouble…

Frikkie de Kok checked his watch. The players should have been out of the dressing room by now.

He carried on talking.

"You see, there's a great irony about the method of execution, hanging. We now support the method of hanging over firing squad or gas chamber or electrocution because we say it is the most effective and the most humane. It didn't start like that. Look where it started, hanging. They wanted the most degrading way of death, and they wanted it to be slow and painful because that was good deterrent. What they were looking for was something that shocked and terrified the people who came to watch a public execution.

The slower the better, because that way the spectators were most frightened. That's the irony. We have taken the most inefficient method and changed it into the most efficient. I like to think that in Pretoria we have the very most efficient and the very most humane system. You can go anywhere in the world, you won't find anything that is better organised than our situation. It's something that we in South Africa can feel genuinely proud of… I think they're stupid not coming out earlier, that's the way you get to pull a hamstring, when you're not properly loosened…"

There was a ripple of applause from the touchline, and shouts from members in the bar. The players ran onto the pitch.

"There was one thing that concerned me the first time I was an assistant, that was the heart of the man. The heart kept beating for a full twenty minutes after he'd dropped.

I'd been told all the things that I told you when you first started. Fracture dislocation of the cervical vertebrae with crushing of the spinal cord. Immediate unconsciousness, no possibility of recovering consciousness because there is no chance of breathing. But that heart was still going. I put my ear against his chest, while he was hanging, and I could hear the heart. It took me several minutes to get accustomed to that heart keeping going… They want to watch the new boy at out half. Fine boy, off last year's high school side.

He could go all the way. I'd like to think my boy could get to play for Harlequins."

"He's on the school team, Mr de Kok."

"But the school's filling his head with university, not with rugby. He's in his books, that's why he's not on the line watching."

There was the question that the assistant had waited two years to ask, the question that fascinated him. For two years he had waited for the opportunity to appear. He thought it was the moment.

"Does he know?"

"Know what?"

There was the roar as the Harlequins kicked off.

"Know what his father does."

He wished he hadn't asked. He saw Frikkie de Kok hesitate.

"I've never told them, not Dawie, not Erasmus. You could say it's like telling them about the sexual functions.

There's never a right time, and anyway they'll learn it all at school. There's never been a right time to tell Dawie what I do, and if I tell him then do I tell Erasmus, and he's two years younger. I suppose I'll wait until they're adults. They might not understand, funny things are young boys' minds. He thinks I run the carpentry courses at Central."

"If my Poppa had done such work, I'd have been proud of him."

"Who knows what they might think… "

The assistant was hunched forward. "Mr de Kok, what would happen to us if the political situation were to change?"

"Change how?" Frikkie de Kok was entranced by the game, nose close to the glass.

"If the present government were to fall."

Frikkie de Kok chuckled. "No chance. And we'll survive, our job isn't political. Every government needs us…

Let me tell you an anecdote from history. There was an executioner down in the Cape, and he hanged and he quartered and he severed limbs, and he was paid by each item, then the British came. We're nearly two hundred years back.

The British said that he should just do hanging. The poor man saw his livelihood going, so what did he do? He went and hanged h i m s e l f… "

They were both laughing.

"… A little bit of change never hurts anyone. I won't be hanging myself, not even if they abolish maximum security.

Too damned fast I'll be off to buy a farm. You won't see me for dust… That man, he's offside."

"Me too, Mr de Kok, I would have said he was offside."

Frikkie de Kok said from the side of his mouth, casual,

"Next Thursday, tomorrow week, that's the Pritchard Five."

"All together?"

"They killed together, they were convicted together…

Look at that."

"That referee's a disgrace, Mr de Kok."

•**

Jack, still dressed, slept on his bed. Exhausted. Harrowed by the high walls he had seen.

He had turned his back on Magazine Hill, he had walked away from the green tree slopes where his father was held.

The minibus driver kept the stops short. Just enough time for the tourists to take their photographs, and for the guide to give her spiel to a German couple, four Americans, and Jack.

The guide was an attractive girl, might have been thirty years old but she wore her hair young in the blonde Diana style. She had sensible shoes, and perhaps that was the giveaway that the girl who had the job of introducing tourists to Soweto was not a child. She talked well. She had to talk well because the material for her to talk about was pathetic in the uniform dreariness of the streets and the homes.

They had come through the Orlando area of the township city. They were on high ground and looking down over the corrugated roofing and the straight roads and across the railway yards and away over further hills that were blistered with roofs.

The guide said, "We don't really know what the population of Soweto is. It's very difficult to get these people to fill in a census form, and they have their relations come to stay with them. They aren't the sort of people who are good with forms. So, it could be anything between one and two million people, we really don't know.. . "

The first reason for Jack to come to Soweto was that he must behave as a tourist. Yesterday he had gone to Pretoria.

Today he was waiting for his contact. And he needed desperately to be out of the hotel, was fearful of every footfall in the corridor, dreaded having to go back, wondering whether his room would be staked out, the explosives discovered.