Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

Jacob Thiroko summoned a prayer for the comrades around him and reached for his rifle.

•**

They stood in the crowd outside the police station in Warmbaths.

The men of the Recce Commando had come and gone.

They had come by police truck, and then run to a helicopter with their arms held over their faces to save their features from snapping cameras. The crowd could hardly have seen them but had cheered their every stride. It was an all White crowd outside the single storey brick police station, a crowd grimly satisfied.

Ros never showed her emotions. Jack didn't know what she felt.

They stood jand they watched as the bodies were lifted from a van and laid out in the forecourt, between two low sand-bagged emplacements, for the police photographer.

There were four young Blacks. They were laid on the dirt, their clothing and the bodies torn, shredded. Last to come was the corpse of Jacob Thiroko. His face was intact, recognisable to Jack. He blinked, felt a sickness in his gut.

The back of Thiroko's head was gone, a mushy wet crater.

He thought Thiroko must have put the barrel of his weapon into his mouth. His talk had brought Thiroko back to South Africa, and killed him. They dropped the body, like it was a meat carcase.

Jan was cold faced. Jack short punched him in the kidneys.

Jan had tried to look as though he enjoyed what he saw, and made a piss poor job of it.

The green saloon car drove to the police station steps.

Jack half remembered the front passenger of the car, who had worn a red shirt when he was parked off the road against the trees. A man in a red shirt carried from the car five A.K.

47 rifles, each sealed in a separate cellophane bag.

He watched a detective wash his stained hands in a fire bucket. He saw the driver of the green saloon car walk to the doorway, tight in his fist was a clear plastic sack. Jack saw that it was filled with charred paper. He felt the weakness sinking through his knees, into his legs.

The light was going over Johannesburg.

The colonel hadn't lowered his blinds, hadn't switched on his strip light. He had sat unmoving, nursing his frustration, since the news had been relayed to him from Warmbaths.

His aides had abandoned him. Now, in the outer office, they warned the detective of his mood. The detective had shrugged, knocked and gone in.

"I thought you should know, sir, of the developments in connection with the bomb investigation. A youngish man, English accent, purchased a similar bag and a similar can of petrol in the city centre on the day of the bomb. The description given by the two sales points is pretty much the same. We're working on a photo-fit likeness, sir. I'll have a copy of the full statements for you first thing."

Ros took charge.

Someone had to. Her brother couldn't speak, was utterly drained. Jack was black in his mood, brooding. While her brother and Jack floundered, Ros assumed the decision taking. Into the car. Away down the long road and back towards Pretoria and Johannesburg. She wondered whether they were already compromised, all three of them. She anticipated that the security police would be waiting for the van Niekerk kids when they reached their home city, the Beetle having been traced. She didn't air her fears.

She asked clipped questions of Jack. She ignored her brother.

"Do you want to fly out tonight?"

"No."

"There's a British Airways every night after the S.A.A. flight, there's Lufthansa and Alitalia. What's the point in staying?"

"I'm not flying."

"You don't have a group, you're one person. Do you have any other contacts to get help?"

"I don't."

"It's idiocy to think of anything but getting yourself out.

Don't you see that?"

"I've no choice."

"Then you've got a death wish."

He told her about Sandham. He told her about Duggie.

"I've debts that have to be paid off. They helped me and they were both killed. They were murdered because I involved them. Do you think, because it's getting hot, I can just pack up and go home? 'Sorry you got chopped, chaps, but it's getting too difficult for me, I'm not going to risk my skin…' Ros, it can't be done."

"Suicide."

"I'll tell you about suicide. The old one amongst the bodies was called Jacob Thiroko. I don't know what was in his mind about coming here, but he hadn't been in South Africa for more than twenty years. And inside his own country the last thing he did was to blow his own brains away.

That was suicide. That was so he couldn't be made to talk.

And before he blew his mind out he burned his papers. He stayed alive long enough to burn his papers and then he killed himself. He can't tell them my name, or any name, or what was the target. That's a hell of a debt to be paid off. I can't walk away, not from them, and not from my father."

"On your own you won't even get to see the gaol."

"Then in Beverly Hills they'll all hear the gunfire. The plans told me that they'll hear it. They have high windows into the catwalks, and up in the catwalk space there are more windows that look down into the cells. Those windows are always open. My father will hear the gunfire. Everyone in that bastard place will know that someone came, someone tried."

She couldn't look at him. She didn't dare to see his face.

"It's madness."

"If I walked away I'd have to live with next Thursday morning. I could be back in London. I could be sitting and filling my gut with booze, and I could take all the tablets that get you to sleep. Wouldn't matter. I'd be in that cell, wondering whether he was scared, what he was thinking.

I'd hear them come for him. I'd see them walk him along the corridors. What do you want me to bloody well do, Ros, go to sleep, set the alarm for five in the morning, wake up to know that my father's being pitched off a trap? What do I do then? Turn over and go back to sleep?"

Jan had leaned forward. Pushing his head between the high seat backs.

"It's to break out one person?"

Jack said, "Yes."

"It is to save one of them?"

"Yes."

"There are five that are going to hang."

"The one is my father."

"And you don't give a shit for the other four?"

Jack dropped his head. "Jan, believe me, I'm not interested in five, I'm going to break out one."

"He's like every other White," Jan shouted. "He's a racist."

Ros snapped, "Grow up, for Christ's sake, he doesn't give a fuck for your grubby little Movement."

"To leave four Blacks to hang, and to try to save one White, that's racism."

"They're killers, those four murdering swine."

"You're a racist, too, Ros."

They were both yelling. Jack's hands went up, palms open, on either side of his head.

"I'm not proud of what I've decided but it's my decision, alone."

"It's all horseshit about you being alone," Jan said.

"If you were alone you wouldn't be in my bloody car,"

Ros said.

Jack leaned across and kissed her on the cheek, and she didn't pull away. He took Jan's hand and shook it fervently.

Christ, what a bloody awful army.

Ros said she was going to Hillbrow. She said there was a studio flat there that belonged to a friend from school. Her friend always gave her the keys when she took her small son back to Durban and her parents. Ros said that there wasn't a husband, nor a live-in man. Ros said that her friend liked to know that someone came to keep an eye on the flat when she was away. Ros said that Hillbrow was the home of the drifters in Johannesburg, where Blacks and Asians and Coloureds and Whites lived alongside each other in tower blocks without being constantly harrassed by the police for violating the residential codes. Ros said he wouldn't be noticed in Hillbrow.