Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

It was dark when they reached Johannesburg.

And he needed to think, because the days were slipping away, Thursday was rushing to him.

The studio flat, fifth floor, was an untidy mess.

They'd come in the back way. The car parked at the rear, so that they could all climb the five flights of the concrete steps of the fire escape. Heavy going for Jan, and Ros and Jack had their hands full. Ros had the key, took a bit of finding in her handbag.

Just one dismal room for living. All there. Bed, cooker, shelves, cupboards, prints on the wall of views of the English Lakes.

He went to the one window. He reckoned he was less than a mile from the Landdrost, but this was a different world.

A crowded pavement below him. He could see Blacks and Whites strolling, and there was a cafe opposite with chairs and tables in the open where he could see the colour mix.

Music from radio stations and records merged, deafening, from the street, from alongside, from above. A prefabricated block, and he thought he heard the bed springs going upstairs and he didn't like to look at Ros. A fight below, same side of the street as the block, and he had to crane to see two guys, White, kicking hell out of a third guy, White, and a girl watching, Black or Coloured or some mix. People walking round them, letting them get on with it.

Jan told him that they had to go home, Ros nodding. Jack understood the risks they took. He had the airport, they had nowhere to run for. Ros had her mouth clenched as Jan said that he would ring at eight and at ten and at midnight. Jack should let the phone ring, but not pick it up. If there were a trace on their home telephone then it would only operate when the phone was lifted at the receiver's end. The ringing phone would tell Jack that all was well with Jan and Ros

… Jack didn't ask what he should do if the phone didn't ring. It was for Jack Curwen to make decisions, not to ask what he should do. His responsibility, all on his shoulders.

Jan said he would come back to the flat in the morning. Ros didn't say when she might see him again. He thought he was alone because he could not imagine how a crippled student and an insurance office desk worker could help him work the break out from the maximum security cells of Beverly Hills. Hard put to see how he could help himself.

He hadn't eaten since breakfast.

He looked in the fridge. There was yoghurt, and some cream cheese, and the remains of a bowl of salad, and some salami slices. He reckoned the girl who lived in the studio flat must be a virtual skeleton. He cleaned out the fridge.

He quartered the large room. It was a compulsion, to see how the single parent lived, what she read, what she wore.

He couldn't have answered for this violation of her privacy other than by saying it was a symptom of his aloneness.

He found the building bricks.

They were the same as he had had when he was a kid.

They were the same as Will had back at Churchill Close.

Lego bricks, product of Denmark, there was a bread bin of them.

Jack sat on the floor and laid out his plans of Beverly Hills, and built the gaol in plastic bricks of blue and red and yellow and white. He built technicolor perimeter walls.

He made C section from red bricks, and administration in yellow, and A and B sections in white. He made the exercise yard of C section 2 in blue. He made a watchtower behind the gallows block, and he built towers where the flood light stanchions were set.

He was a child at play.

There were no roofs for his buildings. He could look down into each cubicle he made, into the cells, into the corridors, into the exercise yards. He put a door between C section's corridor and C section 2's corridor. He put a door on a cell.

He could count the number of the doors, he could count the number of the walls.

With the bricks that remained he located Pretoria Local and Pretoria Central and the White Politicals and the Women's. He scattered the prison staff homes, and the self service store, and the recreation and swimming areas, all on the north slope below Beverly Hills. Level with the gaol, on the west side, he put the Commissioner of Prison's residence.

He laid out a sheet of paper for the rifle range on the east side. He made a broken line with the last of the bricks to make the outer ring of wire fences on Magazine Hill to the south.

He sat cross-legged, his back against the bed, and gazed down at the gaol. A long time he sat, unmoving, searching for the plan, worrying for the route. He sat in the half light, only the light beside the bed on. Searching and worrying.

Jack stood. He went to the kitchenette area of the room and rifled the drawers and cupboards until he found a set of cooking scales. From his suitcase he lifted out the package of explosives. He didn't think the wrapping would weigh much, not enough to confuse his calculations. He weighed the explosives.

He had fifteen pounds and four ounces of plaster gelignite.

He replaced the gelignite in the suitcase, laid it beside the wrapped detonators and the firing wire.

There was a telephone beside the bed.

It was an impulse, born of aloneness. It was eight minutes to three in the morning, Sunday morning.

Below the flat, Hillbrow slept. The streets had at last quietened.

He wondered if his father slept.

Jack knew that if he did not make the call then he might just as well take a taxi to the airport in a dozen hours' time and book a flight and fly out.

He found a book with the code and dialled. He had made up his mind.

The ringing of the telephone scattered the cats.

The bell drove them from the newspaper covering the kitchen table, and from the cushioned chair beside the stove, sent them scurrying to the dark corners.

George Hawkins blundered into the kitchen, groping for the light switch, reaching for the telephone. He heard the distant voice. No rambling small talk, no crap about the weather, nor about the time in the morning.

The wall was twenty feet high, it was eighteen inches thick. What was the minimum explosive required with a conical shaped charge of nine inches in diameter to knock a man-sized hole at ground level?

"Bugger… "

George needed paper and pencil. Couldn't find them.

Didn't know where he'd last put them. Had to do the calculation in his head. And he was half asleep.

"Shit…"

And the boy was talking about minimums. If he was on about minimums, then the boy was in trouble, deep bloody trouble.

"Twelve pounds is absolute bloody minimum. Problem with the minimum is that the concrete on the far side of the reinforcing mesh may not be broken clear. Ideal would be fifteen to eighteen."

The minimum?

"That's twelve pounds."

How could the reverse end of the firing tube be blocked?

"Concrete mix."

Could the conical shaping be lightweight, aluminium?

"Not important that it's heavy. It's good if it's lightweight."

How much stand off should there be from the firing end of the metal tubing to the wall?

"For a man-sized hole you should have six to nine inches

… Twelve pounds of explosive, that's the absolute bloody bottom line… "

The telephone purred in his ear.

For a full minute George Hawkins held the receiver against his face, shivered in his pyjamas. He put the telephone down and went and sat in his chair and he called for the cats and rubbed the warmth into his bare skinny feet. George Hawkins shook his head, slowly, sadly. He had been asked for the minimum. He had answered the question. Twelve pounds was the bloody border line. The boy was in trouble.

He sat for an hour with his cats on his lap before he eased them off and went back to his cold bed.

As the city slept late on Sunday the colonel worked at his desk.