I helped her put the deli on the table, the simple things she liked now: a French loaf, smoked chicken, sweet-and-sour pickles, tomatoes. We sat down to eat.
For the first time in months, she spoke about my father’s illness. It was the worst year of our lives. I would have come home to see them through it had I been able. It was clear that my father would not be travelling again. The false cheer when we spoke on the telephone could not hide the strain in their voices, each pained in its own way. The negotiations were going on in South Africa, but the place looked so violent from a distance. Everyone kept saying the process might still be derailed, it was not yet irreversible, to use the magic word. We spoke in riddles and I was never sure if we were talking about my father’s cancer or the end of apartheid.
‘He was so brave,’ she said. ‘Even at the end, he found it in himself to laugh. Once he sat down in his old camping chair on the patio and the canvas seat tore. How we laughed! — even though he was sick. In fact, that’s what made it funny, that the chair should break although there was nothing left of him, he was skin and bone.’
Rosco Dunn was an echo chamber in which I kept hearing things. It was the perfect name for a boxer, not a champion mind you, but a contender. Finally I called Lenny Craven on the sports desk at the Times and he knew all about it. Knoetze had played Rosco Dunn in Bomber opposite Bud Spencer. Skop, skiet en donder, Lenny said, ham in all three disciplines. Rosco was a military man and the villain of the piece. I assumed the name was a screenwriter’s invention, but when Lenny’s fax came through I had to wonder if Knoetze hadn’t made it up himself: Richard Dunn, Duane Bobick, Denton Ruddock. He’d beaten them all in successive fights. Roll the names together in your mouth and you might get Rosco Dunn.
My second visit to Mrs Pinheiro started badly. I had scarcely sat down at the end of the pew when she planted herself in front of the desk like a lawyer in a courtroom drama and said, ‘You’re not a historian.’
‘Mrs Pinheiro —’
‘You’re much too young.’
‘That’s not important,’ I managed to say.
‘Why do you come with this nonsense about boxing? My father built this house. I was born and raised here.’ She pointed a crooked finger at Dr Pinheiro’s room. ‘If there was a boxer in this house he would have been my brother, I can promise you that.’
‘Rosco Dunn,’ I said.
‘Stop it, please. I know what you’re up to.’
I was all ears.
‘You’re an estate agent.’
‘Oh. Is that why you let me in?’
‘I knew it! You get a feeling about someone. The minute I saw you, I thought you were in the market. This area has gone to the dogs and some stupid people are giving their houses away. You’re not the first greedy agent to come snooping around here pretending to be looking for your cousin or collecting money for Boys Town.’
For a moment, my surprise that she was on to me obscured the fact that she was also entirely mistaken. It was tempting to go along with this new fiction, I felt like trying it on for size, but it was time to confess.
‘You’re right, I’m not an historian … but I’m not an estate agent either.’
She wouldn’t listen. ‘You work for Wanda Bollo?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Tony Braz?’
‘No, I’m a photographer, a commercial photographer, and not a very good one.’
That stopped her dead. ‘A bad photographer?’
‘Scout’s honour.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I was here more than ten years ago, not in your house but next door at the Dittons. I came with a photographer called Saul Auerbach, a real professional. We were going to knock on your door and ask whether we could take some pictures but we never got that far, we ran out of time. I never stopped wondering what this place was like inside. When I found myself in your neighbourhood last week, I decided to try my luck.’
‘After all this time?’
‘I’m sure it sounds strange, but it’s the truth.’
‘Then why didn’t you just say so?’
‘It seemed too complicated.’
With a disapproving click of her tongue, Mrs Pinheiro went to the sickroom, listened briefly at the door and slipped inside. As the door opened and shut, a tattered pennant of noise blew out through the gap. A moment later the door opened and shut again, and she was back with a photograph in a frame.
‘Dottie left it to me when they moved,’ she said. ‘Something to remember her by.’
The frame was ornately leafy with the gilt chipped off its edges. Various photo-booth strips, creased passport photos and snapshots with pinked edges, tucked into the gap between glass and frame on either side, made it look like a stage with people peering out from the wings. Behind these rubbernecks, I saw Mrs Ditton in her lounge.
It was years before I came across Auerbach’s book. Despite myself, I’d started taking more care over my photos. Using a camera nearly every day, watching people pick through my amateurish location snaps on the boardroom table — What on earth is this? — made me want to do better. Looking for guidance rather than inspiration, I turned to the photography shelves in the bookshops. On a Saturday morning, in the clutter of the Africa Centre, there it was: Accidental Portraits. Ignoring the viewing copy on top of the pile of books, I bought one sealed in plastic, sight unseen, and carried it home like a guilty secret.
The photo of Veronica was near the front. As I paged, I had been picturing her in the yard, against the red iron walls and bright lines of washing, but of course she was inside the shack in black and white. For the first time I saw into the dim interior, where she sat on an iron bed cradling her two babies.
The caption read: ‘Veronica Setshedi and her children, Joel and Amos, the surviving pair of a set of triplets, in their backyard shack in Emerald Street, Kensington, 1982. The third child, pictured in the smaller photograph, died the previous year from inhaling the poisonous fumes of a brazier. Veronica’s husband Zeph is employed as a scooter driver by a large bank. They receive no special assistance from his employer or the state.’
My account of the day flickered in the glare of this image. So this is what will be left, I thought, for better or worse. This moment.
I paged further, through a long procession of Auerbach’s people, municipal clerks, deep-level miners, shop assistants, a policeman with a cigarette pinched between his fingers, a flat cleaner with leather pads like shoes strapped to his knees, a house painter with freckles of PVA on his forearms. Absence had sharpened my relationship to these strangers. Without making the heart grow fonder, it had thinned the skin of my eye until every one of them could seem representative. In the flesh, on the same street, I would have kept my distance; at this scale, at this remove, they drew close and felt familiar. All their names were on the tip of my tongue. I kept thinking: I know this person. I know this kind of person.
And there was Mrs Ditton among her bruised artefacts, displayed like an idol on a cross-stitched cushion full of horsehair and gristle, her fingernails gaping like mouths.
When I turned the page, I almost expected to see the house next door.
Later I showed the book to Richard, thinking I might speak of my small part in it. He laughed as he leafed through it, smoothing the gloom out of every page with the flat of his hand. ‘Can you believe these people? It’s like Louisiana without the bayous. Son of a gun we’re having fun anyway.’ He was about to audition for some Sam Shepard play at the Tricycle — True West, I think it was, or Buried Child — and he said this was just what he needed for his research. ‘Look at this moustache. Can you see me in one of those? I can use that.’