Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

There was the crying and the coughing and the slither tread of the guard on the catwalk, and there was the sound of a lavatory flushing. There was laughter from out in the corridor, where the prison officers played cards to pass away the day.

Faintly he heard the singing.

Just a murmur at first.

The edges and clarity were knocked off the singing by the many windows and the yards of the catwalk that it passed through. The singing was from right across the far side of Beverly Hills, from A section or B section. Jeez saw Oosthuizen fidget.

"Who's it for?"

"I'm not allowed to tell you that."

"Sergeant…" Jeez held Oosthuizen with his eyes.

Oosthuizen pulled at his moustache, then shrugged, and dropped his voice. "For the boy who's going on Tuesday."

"Who is he, Sergeant?"

"Just a Coloured."

The whole place was mad. There was a worry that a man smoked too much and might harm his health before it was time for him to have his neck stretched, which might just do his health a bit more harm. There was worry that a prison officer who was retiring on Thursday might get into trouble for a quiet conversation on his last Sunday morning.

"What's he like, the fellow who does it?"

"You trying to get me on a charge sheet, Carew?"

"What's he like?"

The voice was a whisper. "He's damned good… Doesn't help you to think about it, forget what I told you… He's as good as anywhere in the whole world. He's fast and he's kind, a real professional."

He won't hurt you, Jeez. So get a grip on it, Jeez, because old Sergeant Oosthuizen says the executioner's a hell of a good operator. Great news, Jeez…

"I'll walk with you on Thursday morning, Carew. I'll hold your arm."

Jeez nodded. He couldn't speak. He didn't think Oosthuizen had attended a hanging in years. He thought that Oosthuizen had made him a bloody great gesture of love.

"I'm going to do the rosters so's I get Monday in here for the day shift, and then I'll have Tuesday off, and then I'll come on again for Tuesday night, and then I'll have Wednesday off and I'll be back on again for Wednesday night, and I'll stay on through… "

"Why, Sergeant?"

The words came in a flood flow. "Because you aren't the same as the others. Because you're here by some sort of accident, I don't know what the accident is. Because you're covering for something, I don't know what it is. Because you shouldn't be here. Because you're not a terrorist, whatever you've done. Because you had the way to save yourself, I don't know why you didn't take it… It's not my place to say that, but it's what I think."

Jeez smiled. "Not your place, Sergeant."

He watched the cell door close on Oosthuizen.

A hell of a week to look forward to. Clean clothes on Monday, and fresh sheets. Library on Wednesday. Early call on Thursday…

Jan had been home, spoken to her, and gone.

Ros waited for her father to leave for his Sunday morning round of golf.

He played every Sunday morning, then came home for his cold lunch. In the afternoon he would do the household bills and write letters. Her father didn't take a drink on Sundays, not even at the golf club. She waited for her father to leave the house, then went to their bedroom.

Her father always brought her mother breakfast before he left to play golf. The maid had all of Sunday off. The family fended for itself without her for one day a week. Every Saturday night and every Sunday night the maid took the long train journey to and from Mabopane in Bophutatswana where her husband was out of work and where her mother looked after her five children. The maid was her family's breadwinner. And when she was away the van Niekerks let the dust accumulate and filled the sink with dishes and were content in the knowledge that it would all be taken care of on the Monday morning.

Ros told her mother a little of the truth, a fraction.

Ros said that she and her brother had met a pleasant young Englishman. She said that she was sorry that she had stayed out for a whole night the previous week, and offered no explanation. She said that she was owed time from work, and she was going away with the Englishman and her brother for Monday and Monday night and all of Tuesday. She'd laughed, and said she'd be chaperoned by Jan.

When she was her daughter's age, her mother had used to drive with her father through the night to Cape Town, for the weekend, more than 1400 kilometres each way, and sleep together in a fleapit, before they were even engaged.

She wondered why her daughter bothered to tell her what she was doing, and couldn't for the life of her fathom why the girl was taking that awkward, intense brother with her.

She thought it would do her daughter the world of good to be bedded by a strong young man. Half the daughters of her friends were married at Ros's age, and some of them already divorced. She thought there was something peculiar about her own girl's plain dressing and shunning of make up.

She slipped out of bed. She slung a cotton dressing gown across her shoulders.

She took Ros to her dressing table and sat her on the stool.

She did what she had not been allowed to do for ten years.

She took the girl in charge. She changed Ros's hair, lifted it, swept it back and gathered it into a red ribbon. She put on for Ros her own eye make-up and cheek highlight and a gentle pink lipstick. She didn't dare to stop. She could hardly believe she was permitted to make the transformation.

She let Ros gaze at herself in the mirror above the dressing table.

She said, "This young man, he's an immigrant?"

"Just a visitor. He's hoping to go back to England on Wednesday or Thursday."

Ros saw the flush of her mother's disappointment.

Later, when her mother had gone back to bed, Ros went to her father's desk and took from the bottom drawer the key to the gun cabinet that was bolted to the wall of the spare bedroom. Gingerly she took out a pump action shot gun, a box of cartridges, and her father's two revolvers along with a second box of. 38 ammunition. She returned the key before hiding the weapons and ammunition in her bed.

The road was straight and the ground on either side of it was barren waste.

Jan talked, too bloody much. He turned his head and shouted through the visor of his crash helmet, and Jack had to lean towards him to hear anything through the thickness of his own helmet. For Jack it was little short of a miracle that the Suzuki moped was able to carry the two of them.

He felt a complete, conspicuous idiot perched on the pillion, squashed into Jan's spare helmet, towering above the kid as they dribbled along at thirty five miles an hour.

They were heading for Duduza, some fifty kilometres southeast of Johannesburg.

Staccato bursts of explanation from Jan.

Past mine workings, through small industrial towns, past a row of empty bungalows deserted because the White staff had left when the mine was exhausted and the homes had been left to the weather and to disintegrate alongside a shanty town for Blacks.

They were on a straight stretch. High grass beside the road. Jan leaned back to shout.

"A White woman was driving past here, couple of years back, before the state of emergency, she was pulled out of her car, killed. It was kids from Duduza did it. Just about here… "

Jack remembered what he had seen on the Pretoria road.

The picture was clear in his mind.

"At that time the Whites had killed hundreds of Blacks, and Blacks had killed two Whites, but the fascist law and order lobby went to work. It was vicious what the army and police did in Duduza. Most of the mothers tried to get their boys out, in girl's clothes, get them away and over the border. Just like the class of '76 in Soweto, there is a class of '85 out of Duduza. Those kids, now, they're in A.N.C. schools in Zambia or Tanzania. They'll come back when they're trained. There's no escape for the Boers…"