Nadine Gordimer - The Pickup

David knows lawyers.

What kind of lawyers can David know. This man is important, his people are big. Listen, Julie.

That was the message of that grasp on her forearm: I am a man. I am the one who is not for you but who possesses you every night: listen to me.

The call came on the cellphone the public relations people she worked for insisted she carry with her at all times. This call was not the chaffing exchange of media jargon which was the communication they favoured. The name of Mr Motsamai’s colleague, his telephone number, his rooms, the date and time of the appointment made. Julie and her problem were at The Table. Background music was particularly intrusive that day, but everyone shut their ears to it: the friends followed her lips as she repeated the information. One of them gave a ballpoint to the lover so that he could take it down, but he had no paper and the poet, who often wrote lines that came to him out of his echo-chamber of the babble in the EL-AY Café, and who suspected that the foreigner might not get the facts right anyway, noted the information for her among the tantric doodles in his chap-book.

Somewhere in an illegal’s few possessions was something she didn’t know existed: a suit. Perhaps it had been kept hanging in its plastic bag in the garage shed. He dressed in it to go to Motsamai’s colleague lawyer. He had said he should go alone, and clearly was confident to do this. He looked at ease in this fashionable loose-jacketed version of the outfit that marks the category of respectable citizen as the black robe marks the category of the judge, and as he did in grease-monkey overalls. She sees that an illegal has to be some sort of chameleon, along with all the other subterfuges to be resorted to. She accompanied him, after all. There might be difficulties with language.

When they were in the lawyer’s rooms, he did all the talking, the manner an insistent alternation of rapidity and groping, at once frustrated and forceful. He found the words: the lawyer understood them, their gist was another language between the two men. Some papers were produced to sign. The man had a fold of pink loose skin that settled from under thick tabby eyebrows halfway down over his upper eyelids; there was something hypnotic about this feature. There would be an application for the 14 days’ grace to be extended, there were particular persons in certain departments to be approached, all this would be done forthwith. Then the real process of obtaining permanent residence status could begin. All considerations were perfectly understood and noted. The client would be kept informed.

Five days, four days, left of the fourteen. Then there was the reprieve — the hypnotist informed his client of an extension of another fourteen days granted on grounds of the legal representative’s further investigation of the case to be presented. They didn’t appear at The Table. In grease-monkey guise he still went every morning to the garage in a ritual that had lost its purpose. They didn’t go out at night. They lay in their bed or sat on the step warm from the day’s sun, and talked into the dark of the night garden. They had lived with nothing but the present and now they talked about the future that would come or never come. It was there, theirs, existed for them.

What’s it you’d really like to do?

Computer science. Study some more.

We could run a project together, while you prepare …

Cape Town would be a nice place.

While you study, there could be a small project, I’ve thought of it vaguely sometimes, copyright agency on Internet, website not office, so many people I know in the arts and entertainment don’t know how copyright works, they’re conned every day. I’m fairly familiar with these things through the PR contacts I’ve had.

Cape Town … beautiful place, they say.

Yes, maybe; we could. We should go somewhere away from everything here. Holidays there, of course, all my life — but I’ve never lived there. Wonderful holidays, as a kid — the sea.

You like it. To live.

Always wanted to live at the sea, I don’t know why I didn’t find the energy to take myself off somewhere. And you? The sea.

I don’t know it. Not at all.

She squeezes his hand that is palm-to-palm with hers: the sand, dust. The sea is the ultimate oasis of the dry world, its depths various with life, its surface free, with crossings that have no frontier, the tides rising on this coastline, then that.

On the seventh day of the reprieve the lawyer leaves a message on her voice-mail. They are to come to him at three-thirty.

He absents himself from the garage without explanation — that doesn’t matter now. She drives him to the cottage to change; she doesn’t like to tell him it’s not necessary to get into the suit, his elegant jeans will do. They both have that strange constriction of the gullet, as if some drawn breath has lodged there. The expression beneath the flap of flesh, the half-hood, is unchanged. The lawyer shakes their hands; hers, his, and they all sit. When he speaks it is only to the foreigner because it is to him that what he has to say applies — the girl is Nigel Ackroyd Summers’ daughter, Motsamai informed — there is no threat to her, she belongs. All possible avenues have been explored. Up to the highest level, he might add. Motsamai had been most helpful. There is no possibility that permanent residence will be granted. He greatly regrets to say: nothing further can be done, by himself or anyone else. He must tell the client this in order to save vain hopes and useless expenditure. — To be frank — even if you were to consider it as a desperate measure, not even money could find the right hand. As you must have read in the papers, there is a big exposure of corruption in that very area, that very Department, right now.—

What is left to ask; but they wait.

First the lawyer repeats what he has told; clients often don’t want to hear, don’t take in bad news, they’ve believed in him beyond professional fallibility, beyond circumstances of their own making, beyond repair.

Now suddenly he talks to the girl as if what he has to say needs to be broken to the client through someone close to him — too blunt to be borne directly. — He will have to leave the country within ten days. I was able to extend that from a week, for him.—

They go back — are back — at the EL-AY Café. Where else is there to go, for her? And for him, there never was anywhere, anyone.

She tells their story to her friends over and over, as this one and that joins The Table at different points in the recounting. They want all the details, it’s their way of showing concern; they repeat them, weighing them over, asking the same questions, a part-song. All around, the coming-and-going, the laughter, scraping of chairs, winding of tape-music, tossing back of hair, flamboyant greetings, murmurs, is unabated: The Table might just as well be having a birthday party.

— Told you before, my Brother, disappear. That’s the only way. Like the Mozambiquans, Congolese, Kenyans, what-not.—

— But he’d better make it somewhere else. Durban, Cape Town, clear out of here.—

— Absolutely not! This’s the only one big enough, it’s the labyrinth to get lost in.—

— Of course, else how do all these others get away with it? Tell me. Tripping over their carvings and schmuck on every pavement — you find them everywhere gabbling happily in their Swahili or French or whatever. So many of them no-one can get a hold. Sheer numbers. They can’t be caught.—

— It’s night in there, man. They’re black like me. This guy here, Abdu, he’s not one of them, his face and everything — it tells the story.—

— Schmuck — what’s that—