Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

Stones rained on the minibus. The windscreen cascaded into the driver's face, across the guide's lap was a shower of diamond glass. Jack was rigid in fear, couldn't move, didn't know how to help himself. Everyone inside the bus shouting, and one of the Americans starting a prayer, and the German pulling his wife back from the side window and replacing her head with his wide-angle lens.

Black faces against the window. A hand with a knife, fists with stones. Muscles to rock the bus. Almost a darkness inside, because the window light was blocked by the Black faces, Black bodies, Black fists.

It was over very suddenly.

Jack hadn't heard the crack of the gas grenade guns, nor the patter of the shotguns, nor the roaring power of the Casspir A.P.C.

When he was aware of the silence he lifted his head. The screaming had stopped. There was a whimpering from one of the American women, the one whose husband had said that the Blacks just wanted work and to be left in peace.

The guide was shivering, but upright, and was painstakingly starting to pick the windscreen fragments from her sweater.

The Casspir had gone past them. The schoolchildren had scattered.

The Casspir bumped on the body of a kid who had been shot in the legs and was writhing, and who was still when he emerged to view again from under the wide heavy tread of the tyres.

A police jeep pulled up alongside the minibus.

Jack saw the savage expression on the officer's face as he climbed out. He couldn't follow the detail of the language as the officer tongue-lashed the guide in Afrikaans. The message was clear enough, they were bloody fools to have been there, they should get the hell out.

Subdued, they drove back to Johannesburg.

The German had damaged his wide-angled lens but by God he'd have a picture or two. The American, from Wash ington state, announced that he'd be making a donation to the South African police. The guide looked straight ahead, hugging herself against the wind through the jagged edges of the windscreen. Jack had learned something of the war.

He had seen twenty kids who would have stoned him to death because he was White. He had seen a kid, minutes out of the classroom, become a statistic in death because he was Black.

At the Carlton Hotel where the bus dropped them off there were no goodbyes, no tips for the driver. The guide had nothing to say to them, not even about communists and agitators.

He went back towards the Landdrost. He approached it as calmly as he could from three angles. No sign of a police presence. And eventually just a friendly greeting from the day porter. Infinite regrets that sir had not had the best impression from his tour.

There was no message.

•**

The solicitor looked again at his watch. In four and a half minutes it was the third time he had looked at the gold face on his wrist.

The prison officer stood behind him, ignoring him.

He sat on the hard wooden chair and looked through the plate glass at the mirror of the room that was opposite him.

The room he looked into was the same in each detail to the one in which he sat. There were no decorations in the visit rooms. A room divided by a wall and a window of plate glass. An identically placed door in each section. Identical tables below the plate glass. A single chair on each side of the glass, and a voice pipe that was like an inverted elephant's trunk for speaking into and for listening through.

He hated this little room, had hated it each time that he had come to visit his client. His one aim was to get his work done, to get back to his car, to drive with his escort to the airlock gate in the outer wall, to get himself through the identity check point on Soetdoringstraat, to get himself out onto Potgieterstraat, as soon as it was marginally decent for him to do so. They had treated him like dirt when he had come in through the checks and searches and delays. They seemed to despise him as they had walked him across the lawn to the visit room. No small talk, as if the presence of a solicitor, a man trying to cheat them from their work, was an irrelevance to their way of work. He had the job because he had once represented James Carew in a case involving a minor traffic accident. In John Vorster Square Carew had given the name of the young solicitor, and a damned black day that had been. He wished to God he had never been involved.

Because he was frightened being so close to the hanging shed, and to the man who was to walk into that shed, he felt resentment against Carew.

He had been telephoned by the colonel of the security police. He had endured a lecture from the Boer policeman.

He knew what had happened. He was a lawyer and he was a citizen of the Republic of South Africa. He had done his damned best to represent Carew at committal, at trial, and since sentence. He had not considered it possible that his client would reject the colonel's deal, not when the rope was the irrevocable alternative. He had done his best for his client, and he had hoped to God that his client would do the best thing for himself and talk to the security police about the A.N.C. The solicitor's parents lived in Durban; that city had been the target of a bomb at Christmas of all times; the A.N.C. were foul murderers. From all he had seen of his client he could not place him in the same category. But then Carew, for all the sessions they had had together, remained an enigma to the young solicitor. The man had a past, he was certain. The nature of the past, his ignorance of it, burned as resentment.

He had done as much as he could for Carew and Carew had done nothing for him, nothing for himself.

He was quite justified in his resentment.

He heard the approach of footsteps down the corridor, sounds distorted through the tube that was the link between his outside world and Carew's inside world in the hanging place.

He had prepared what he would say to Carew. He would tell Carew that he had done all that was possible to save his life. He would tell his client that rejecting the colonel's offer had been an act of egregious folly. He was going to tell his client that it would be a waste of time to attempt another clemency petition.

That in his view it was so damned unnecessary.

The door was opened.

Jeez was led in.

Through the glass the solicitor stared at Jeez. He thought his man was frailer than when he had last seen him, as if he had lost weight, as if the skin on his cheeks had been peeled back and the flesh underneath scalpelled away and then the skin rolled back again to sag over the hollowness.

Jeez sat down opposite him.

God, how to be sharp with a man who was going to walk to the gallows.

There was a small smile on Jeez's face. The solicitor understood. The bastard knew. The obstinate bastard had known what he had done when he had walked out on the colonel. The solicitor could not consider how a man voluntarily turned his back on life, not when the choice was his.

"Good of you to call round, young man. Did you have a pleasant drive over?"

The solicitor swallowed hard. The resentment died in him. In a torrent flow he told Jeez that the legal options were exhausted.

• •*

It was all because of a series of coincidences.

Because an assessor had been called back into the army for reserve service, and another assessor had been at home with his wife and newly-born baby, and her supervisor had thought it would be good experience for her to be out of the office, Ros van Niekerk had gone to a fire damaged home in Sandton. The cook/maid had left the electric chip frier on all night. The chip frier had finally caught fire in the small hours, gutting an expensive kitchen. She had gone to work that morning in a pure white skirt, and that skirt had been dirtied as she had moved about the kitchen assessing the damage and agreeing the size of the claim. Ros went home to change after the call.