Of course, they kept chickens among whatever dirt and degradation was behind that fence. He must have done another couple of kilometres; there were no more factory buildings but the shanties occupied the land all along the other side of the road. Here in places the metal fence had collapsed under the pressure of shelters that leant against it and sections had been filched to roof other shacks, yet the life in there was not exposed to the road because the jumbled crowding of makeshift board and planks, bits of wrecked vehicles, cardboard and plastic sheeting closed off from view how far back the swarm of habitation extended. But as he turned to go home — it burst open, revealing itself.
Men came flying at him. The assault exaggerated their faces like close-ups in film; for a vivid second he saw rather than felt through the rictus of his mouth and cheek muscles the instant gaping fear that must have opened his mouth and stretched his cheeks like a rubber mask. They rushed over him colliding with him, swerving against him, battering him. But in their passage: they were carrying him along with them. They were not after him. Fuses were blowing in the panic impulses along the paths of his brain, he received incoherently the realization that he was something in their path — a box they tripped over, an abandoned tyre-tube bowling as they kicked past it — swept into their pursuit. What had seemed to be one of them was the man they were after, and that man’s terror and their rage were a single fury in which he hadn’t distinguished one from the other. The man’s shirt was ripped down the back, another hobbled wildly with one shoe lost, some wore red rags tied pirate-style round their heads, knobbed clubs swung above them, long pieces of wire strong and sharp enough to skewer a man armed them, one loped with a sledge-hammer over his shoulder, there were cleavers, and a butcher’s knife ground to sword-point and dangling from a bracelet of plaited red plastic. They were bellowing in a language he didn’t need to understand in order to understand, the stink of adrenaline sweat was coming from the furnace within them. The victim’s knees pumped up almost to his chin, he zigzagged about the road, the road that was never to be crossed, and the tight mob raced with him, hampered and terrible with their weaponry, and he who had blundered into the chase was whirled along as if caught up by some carnival crowd in which, this time, the presence of death was not fancy dress.
The race of pursued and pursuers broke suddenly from one side of the road to the other, he was thrust to the edge of the wild press and saw his chance.
Out.
The fence was down. The squatter shacks: he was on the wrong side. The road was no longer the sure boundary between that place and his suburb. It was the barrier that prevented him from getting away from the wrong side. In the empty road (would no one come, would no one stop it) the man went down under chants and the blows of a club with a gnarled knob as big as a child’s head, the butcher’s knife plunged, the pointed wires dug, the body writhed away like a chopped worm. On the oil stains of the tarmac blood was superimposing another spill.
He fled down among the shacks. Two bare-arsed children squatting to pee jumped up and bounded from him like rats. A man lifted the sack over an aperture in tin and quickly let it fall. There were cooking pots and ashes and a tethered donkey, the scabby body of a car like the eviscerated shell of a giant beetle, lamed supermarket trolleys, mud walls, beer cans; silence. Desertion; or the vacuum created by people left behind by the passage of violence, keeping out of it, holding breath. The haphazard strips of muddy passage between whatever passed for walls were so narrow he seemed to have entered a single habitation where, unseen, people all around followed him — his breathing, his panting breath — from room to room. A white man! He felt himself only to be a white man, no other identity, no other way to be known: to pull aside a sack and say, I’m in brokerage, give his name, his bona fide address — that was nothing, these qualifications of his existence meant nothing. And then a woman appeared out of a shack that had a door. — Get inside. It’s dangerous. — A firm grip, a big butterscotch-coloured upper arm in a tight-filled short sleeve, yellow- and pink-flowered. He ducked into her doorway with a push from her in his back.
— They terrible, those people, they’ll kill anybody. They will. — She had the strict face formed by respectability, a black woman churchgoer’s face, her eyes distant and narrowed behind butterfly-shaped spectacle frames with gilt scrolls. Other people in dimness were staring. A piece of canvas hung over what must be a square of window. Light came only from the gaps between tin walls and the roof low on his head. — You see, I run… I was just on the other side of the road, out for a run …—
A young man who was turned away from this apparition, paring his nails, children, a stooping man in pyjama trousers and a pullover, a girl with a blanket wrapped round her body below naked shoulders, doek awry from sleep.
He had a momentary loss of control, wanting to collapse against the woman, clutch her used big body under her apron and take the shield of her warmth against his trembling. — What’s happening — who was it — he’s dead there, in the road.—
She spoke for everyone. — From the hostel. They come from the hostel, they come in here and kill us.—
— I read about it. — His head wagged like a puppet’s, down, down to his chest.
— You read about it! — She gave a short slap of a laugh. — Every night, we don’t know. They come or they don’t come—
— Who are they?—
— The police send them.—
He could not say to this woman, That’s not what I read.
— Tomorrow it can be him. — The woman uncrossed her fine arms and presented the profile of the young man.
— Him?—
— Yes, my son. Come and knock on the wall shouting it’s all right, call him comrade so he’ll believe, and if he doesn’t go out, break in and beat my husband, there, you see him, he’s an old man already — take my son and kill him.—
Nothing moves a man on behalf of others so surely as danger to himself. — It was wonderful of you to open your door like that. I mean, for me. I don’t know what to say. Why him? What would make them come for your son?—
The young man shifted abruptly, turning still more pointedly away from the apparition his mother had brought in among them.
— My son’s in the Youth — the street committee.—
The kind who burned government appointees’ houses, stoned buses, boycotted schools. And lived here — slowly he was making out of the dimness and his own shock what this habitation was. Its intimacy pressed around him, a mould in which his own dimensions were redefined. He took up space where the space allowed each resident must be scrupulously confined and observed. The space itself was divided in two by curtains which stretched across it, not quite drawn closed, so that he could see the double bed with a flounced green satin cover which filled one half. A table with pots and a spirit stove, a dresser with crockery, a sagging armchair into which the old man sank, a chromium-shiny radio cassette player, a girlie calendar, Good Shepherd Jesus, framed, with a gold tinsel halo, the droop of clothes hanging from nails, vague darkness of folded blankets — that was the second half. He saw now there were three children as well as the grown daughter and son; seven people lived here.