The Third Reel Page 2

  The ecc didn’t write back. A man called Etienne: ‘Better not to write things down.’ First there were a few suspicious questions; his Afrikaans surname – Nieuwenhuis – didn’t help. An explication of the principles of pacifism followed. And of available options. How it would help others if he stayed on in the country as a conscientious objector. ‘It started with a few courageous individuals, but the ranks are growing. Ultimately they won’t be able to prosecute everyone; the whole system will start collaps—’

  ‘Practical advice,’ Etienne said, ‘is all I need. I want to go to London. As soon as possible.’ The man lost interest. He provided cosawr’s London contact detail, wished Etienne the best and ended the conversation.

  In one respect his father was right. It was time to grow up. A month later Etienne was in the departure hall of Jan Smuts airport.

  He thinks back to his arrival in London, like an orphan with his old-fashioned suitcase. He went directly to cosawr’s office, where Ben, a beautiful Jewish Johannesburger, referred him to one Miss Jackson when Etienne told him that he had brought very little money with him. She had a rambling old Victorian house in Kilburn, Ben explained, where she let rooms for a song to young South African men. Everyone in her boarding house was a draft dodger. Not one of them could go back home.

  ‘She almost never turns anyone away. And for the first month or two one stays for free.’ Ben also gave him information about applying for asylum; they would assist him. And he handed Etienne a small-format magazine: Resister, the paper of the anti-conscription movement.

  He took the Tube to Kilburn. Miss Jackson opened the front door in a free-flowing tie-dye dress, linen scarf around her neck, breasts like pendulums. He complimented her on the scarf. ‘Mexican,’ she said. She didn’t invite him in; they kept standing in the entrance hall. Young men came and went. One or two greeted him in passing. Etienne glanced at them. He could see how Miss Jackson gauged his gaze. He gauged her too, this mother for sensitive souls who had escaped Angola and the burning townships: young bodies from the south, their fresh skins still sun-darkened for their first few months in the north.

  Etienne enquired about accommodation options. She remarked: ‘What an interesting accent!’ She looked at his pale stalk of a body, at his straight black hair. ‘It is unusual, but I’m afraid every room here is currently occupied . . .’

  As consolation prize she introduced him to one of her lodgers. Brent. A Capetonian, a sociologist who had studied at uct. The only trace remaining of the southern sun was a spray of freckles over the bridge of his nose. His hair was thin and dull red, his chin long. Brent took him to a little café in Kilburn High Road. Brent spoke to him about ‘the Cause’, about the illegal occupation of South-West Africa (Namibia, as he referred to it), about the war. The militarisation of South African society. The sacrifices of courageous individuals. He wanted Etienne to become involved in the London anti-apartheid structures.

  Etienne looked at Brent’s loose t-shirt, at the drooping corners of his mouth. ‘Do you perhaps know of a place where I can stay?’

  When the waitress brought their cups, she spilled milky tea on Etienne’s suitcase. Brent looked intently at Etienne. ‘Do you agree that we, with our privileges and our education, have a duty? That we are uniquely positioned to effect change? The world’s eyes are on South Africa. Now more than ever.’

  Etienne looked at Brent’s Adam’s apple. He hadn’t slept in thirty hours. His eyes were hardly focusing; his skin was sticky. ‘Education?’ He thought of Mister van Rooyen’s buttocks, of his physics lecturer’s golden-framed spectacles. ‘I’ve barely had one. And, in any event, hardly gained any wisdom from it.’

  They walked back to Miss Jackson’s place. Under Moroccan light shades in the lounge, Brent made a phone call to an acquaintance in a squat in Vauxhall. ‘You’ll like him. Patrick. A Jamaican. He says there’s always room at their place, especially for someone who’s escaped the South African fascists’ clutches.’

  When he arrived in Bonnington Square, south of the Thames, No. 52 in Brent’s handwrit­ing on a piece of paper in his hand, the front door was wide open. He knocked nevertheless. No sign of life. He entered. The house smelled of stale incense and boiled vegetables. In a communal living room, there were cushions on the wooden floor. He went up the stairs. On the first floor a door was standing ajar. Sweet vapours emanated from the room, and reggae from a boom box. Etienne peered in. ‘Hey, man,’ someone said from a cloud of smoke. Etienne just nodded. ‘I’m Patrick. Make yourself at home. Try the attic room. There’s a bed. I think.’ He didn’t move from his mattress. ‘And by the way, respect, man.’ The respect, Etienne realised after a few moments, related to their shared disdain for the fascists in the distant south.

  In the top room there was a futon under a sloping ceiling with a skylight. Etienne opened it, stuck his head out. Outside was a flat roof and, a few storeys down, a little park or public garden. There was no cupboard, but there was a corner for his drums that he had shipped before his departure from South Africa. He could now, at last, provide a delivery address to the shipping firm. He rolled his shoulders in their sockets, loosening up. Soon he would feel the drumsticks against his palms again.

  When he returns from Frank’s church tower, two weeks after his arrival, there is a letter on his futon. Protea stamps, the address in his father’s handwriting. Strong upward lines, kinks crossing and twisting like lightning. The line under United Kingdom almost cuts through the envelope. He curses his mother. Shortly after his arrival he had sent her a telegram with his address. It started with dont show to dad stop. His father must have put her under enormous pressure.

  Etienne closes the door, sits down on his futon in the morning sun. He opens the letter. It will not affect him, he resolves. But as he reads, something starts twisting in his chest. The closing paragraphs read:

  And I won’t send you a cent. If you want to go and live in a grey city, far from your own people, don’t expect sympathy from me. If you run away like a coward from your duty to defend your country – after I’d paid for your studies, and in your final year! – let the British support you. Go and queue for the dole. Or do some manual labour. Go and work with your hands, like a Bantu.

  Do you have any inkling of the damage you are doing to my reputation? What a scandal it is to have you as my son? If I had known what you were planning, I would have handed you over to the military police myself.

  Now, Etienne thinks, I am on my own. ‘Good,’ he says out loud. He doesn’t recognise the sound of his own voice. He has the sense of something plunging inside him, like in a house where things are toppling from shelves and cupboards.

  Chapter 3

  Apart from Patrick, there are two Brits and a Belgian in No. 52. Etienne rarely sees them. He has had to get used to doors that don’t lock, and to residents of the Square drifting freely through rooms. Here you have no property. You don’t belong to anyone, and no one belongs to you. Everyone has access to everyone else, and to each other’s possessions. Nothing is forbidden or compulsory. No one has any claims. He likes it. One big free-floating body. A pond in which one can swim around unencumbered. No one making rules, no one in control.

  The drum kit has arrived. That, he hopes, will remain his. And his passport, as long as he needs it. His application for asylum is in process. It is scorching him, the green booklet he carries around in his underpants. A tainted document, a brand mark next to the scrotum. As soon as he can, he will cast off his origins like a worn piece of clothing.

  He concentrates on shaking off his accent. Soon he starts succeeding. He pricks up his ears, imitates others. Patrick remarks that he hardly sounds like a South Londoner, rather like a bbc newsreader. In the evenings Patrick’s marijuana smoke drifts up to him where he is practising his sentences under the skylight. Words and syllables. Phrases. Over and over: pronunciation, tone, cadence.

  He has to get past things – this is how h
e thinks of his project here. Like overtaking vehicles on a highway. Past Mister van Rooyen with his sweaty buttocks, past the chunk of bronze violence on his father’s desk, past his mother’s eyes and past the people of the ecc and cosawr. Not to say anything about Miss Jackson and Brent. And he wants to empty his mind of his studies in South Africa: the proofs he could always memorise so easily, the plans and diagrams he could draw so precisely. How strange that, despite all the years spent bent over his engineering textbooks, such a deep rift kept yawning between him and the signs on those pages. They are like a strange machine in his hands, those terms and formulae. He wants to drop that machine, let it shatter into solenoids and resistors.

  The week after their first meeting, Etienne spends hours with Frank in his tower. The summer afternoons are long. Silver sweat soaking the sheets inside, the silver river flowing outside. The Thames’s currents alternate rhythmically, violently with the tides. And in the cool early evenings they wander through the city. Everywhere Frank elaborates on how things once were. In 1850. Or 1750. Places where pontoons used to cross the river. Or where executions once took place. The site of the city’s first sewage works. He strips the city away, layer by layer.

  Soon Etienne realises: he is not the only one for whom the bells are tolled. He hears them ringing at other times. A sound like a flare in the night. ‘Jesus,’ Patrick says one morning, wandering around in a dressing gown, hands covering his ears. ‘That fucker in the tower again. Can’t he stop announcing his conquests to the entire world?’ A dagger in Etienne’s side. Patrick observes him with a sly eye. ‘You too, hey? You’re also a tower visitor?’ He shakes his head, the dreadlocks swaying. ‘For you it’s a summer of first loves. That guy . . . He’s known lots of seasons, man.’ He inhales smoke. ‘He’s gathering a congregation. To worship his arse.’

  Etienne starts withdrawing in Frank’s company. He observes him, listens to his damp voice. Everywhere the monologue accompanies him; everything in the city is secret code for something else. Etienne is tiring of all the information about bygone things. There is enough that is new here. Frank – his New Zealand rugby legs and wealth of black hair – is here; the rest of him is dispersed over the centuries. As the enthusiasm of Etienne’s reception starts waning, the speeches become fewer.

  There are other noises in London, Etienne thinks, than those emanating from Frank’s tower. The two of them still sometimes intertwine in the tower. But Frank is like a parent killing a child in its sleep with sheer body weight, like someone in a violent coma. When the bells ring, Etienne’s heart no longer kicks fiercely in response.

  The houses in the Square vary in their degrees of dilapidation. The inhabitants are constantly at work. Basins, tiles and cement are bartered. Old gas ovens and fridges rattle on trolleys in the streets. Trees are planted: in little gardens behind houses, in the community garden, on pavements. People build wooden sculptures and set them alight when parties end. Everywhere violins and flutes sound. Bands practise: late punk, British or Irish folk, guys whacking engine parts. There is a café where inhabitants, now including Etienne, take turns cooking. Ingredients come from gardens in the Square. Anyone may eat there for free.

  No. 37 is used as a bar. The house was grazed by a German bomb in the ’40s. Part of the roof is missing; of most interior walls just wooden skeletons are left. In the back garden, amid the tall grass, there are rusty sculptures, welded together from car parts. Late at night, No. 37 is a refuge; here you will always find people drinking beer. A fire burns constantly in the black marble fireplace, irrespective of the weather. You are simultaneously inside and outside. Under the greenish London sky, drinkers project their silences at each other. Or talk incessantly through the night. The conversations have an undercurrent of revolution. The parliament building across the river is the focus of anger and resistance.

  Nothing is stolen in the Square. Things circulate, though, flowing from high to low concentration. Some houses are densely packed with canvases, found objects, rubbish, pots of paint, clay, photographs, old newspapers. Works of art don’t survive for long. They are given away, or taken. Briefly exhibited in rooms, taken apart, sawn into pieces. Lovers make pieces for each other, then destroy them with fire or a garden fork when the relationship sours. Or leave them in the rain until the paint washes away.

  One afternoon Etienne hears music outside. He looks out: people congregating in the community garden. All women. An orchestra playing medieval music, people singing and picnicking. He darts down the stairs, goes outside and joins them. A German woman with reticent shoulders offers him cheese and bread. The cheese is from the Bavarian village that she hails from. Her name is Hilde. She wants to know where Etienne comes from, what brought him here. His accent, he realises, is still betraying him. He gives a vague answer.

  She tells Etienne about Bonnington Square. In the ’70s, she explains, the Square was cordoned off; houses were to be demolished. She and her lover were among the first people to move into a house here. They cut the wire fencing and slipped in. It was an inhospitable place: windows had been bricked up, pipes and cables pulled out, sewage pipes blocked with concrete. It looked like German cities after the war. Houses often had no doors; just a few had electricity and water. Gradually places were made more habitable. Brick by brick, window frame by window frame. ‘In the beginning,’ she says, ‘there were only a few of us.’ She tells about smoke rising through collapsed roofs on winter days. About rooms in which people would sleep in rows on mats. Like rats. ‘Now it’s home,’ she says. ‘Or almost.’

  He moves on, past herb and vegetable gardens. He speaks to Glenda. She is from Glasgow. She is agitating; her voice is vehement, her r s brutal. Even though she is speaking loudly above the orchestra, he has to strain his ears to decipher the accent. ‘We’ll secede! Decolonise the Square, shut it off against the chaos. And when Thatcher sends her henchmen, we’ll block the streets. And then it’s fucking war.’ She imagines the scene out loud: barricades of furniture and mattresses, shouting, petrol bombs. ‘Total resistance,’ she says. And in the same breath: ‘We’ll make a forest of this place.’ She looks at the garden. ‘I’ve been planting trees for years. Look at my palms.’ She shows her calluses, speaking softly now. ‘We wanted to bring intimacy,’ she says, bending down and touching the leaves of a sapling. ‘Tenderness and filtered light.’ The trees will envelop the Square in shadows, that she swears: ‘Like the shade of my lover’s body, like her inner thighs in the London spring.’ They will make the Square invisible to the exploiters, to the enemies in the parliament and the City. These promises aren’t made only to Etienne but to the entire city. Etienne imagines a furious forest from a Scottish woman’s fingers: tree roots that crack open the streets and lift foundations, branches pushing at walls. Breaking and protecting. A revolution of the plants.

  Hilde joins them. She has an unusually long upper body, Etienne notices. She is Glenda’s lover, it turns out, of the tender spring thighs. In her gentle German village voice she tells how they are mobilising, how they are resisting eviction. ‘Do you want to get involved? Help us to fend off the wolves?’ Etienne smiles evasively.

  Chapter 4

  Every day, in the early afternoon, a 1960s social housing block casts a long shadow over No. 52. When the column creeps closer, Etienne’s room smells of wet concrete.

  In such a shadowy hour he clambers through the skylight onto the flat roof. In the community garden people often practise street art: juggling, unicycle riding, acrobatics. Today a dark-blond man is sitting in front of a bed of herbs, sketching. Etienne observes him. The shadow shifts, moves along; the sun bakes down on their shoulder blades. The draftsman takes off his shirt, Etienne too. The man’s pencil stops. He looks up at Etienne; Etienne grins and goes inside. For a while he sits on his futon, his heart beating wildly; then he goes down the stairs.

  ‘May I see?’ Etienne asks, approaching the man in the garden. He hesitates, then holds out the drawing. A herb
plant, freshly extracted from the soil. Precise, photorealistic. Each hair on the stem is reproduced, each grain of sand on the roots.

  Etienne asks his name. ‘Aodhan.’ An Irishman, judging by the accent. Blue eyes. Glacier blue, the light of a dead planet. Aodhan closes his sketchbook. They look at each other, walk out into the street together. At the turn-off to Vauxhall Grove they vacillate. The corners of Aodhan’s mouth move. Come, he indicates with his head.

  They stop in front of the very block that casts a shadow over Etienne’s room in the afternoons. The front door has been kicked off its hinges. Aodhan enters, Etienne follows. The ammonia smell of urine enters his nostrils. They climb the stairs to the sixteenth floor, walk down the corridor. Etienne looks into empty flats; through the windows one catches glimpses of the city.

  ‘The Council has condemned the place,’ Aodhan says. ‘It’s supposedly unsafe. There are only a few of us here. Junkies, mostly. Not a happy hippy circle like you guys in the Square.’ From the corridor an electrical cord leads into Aodhan’s space. Inside are a mattress and cardboard boxes, a television in a corner. The floor is bare concrete. Below them lies the city. A bird of prey against a cliff, Etienne thinks, looking at Aodhan.