He was not prepared for life below ground. The elevator taking him down was very old and shook and its revolving belts squealed and cried like a man in agony. A hot wind carried on it the smell of metallic dust that blew from the yawning black holes at each end of the platform. A few desultory late-night passengers moped disconsolately in the shadows. Advertisements lined the sides of the tunnel. Most seemed to be taken up with lingerie and the delights of early retirement.
Blanchaille heard a terrible noise, a shouting, a screaming and howling as if troops of banshees were approaching, their cries emphasised by the hollowness of the deep underground. The waiting passengers seemed to know what was happening because he saw them scurrying for the far dark corners of the platform. With a great burst of shouting, singing, clapping, a strange army of young men arrived. They wore scarves and big boots, waved rattles and flags. The posse of policemen guarding them had trouble keeping them under control. Red seemed to be their colour, red bobble caps and scarves and shirts and socks, streamers and pennants.
They were marched to the far end of the platform, laughing and threatening to push each other onto the rails and terrorising the passengers. No sooner were they in place when the second army was ushered on to the platform and marched down towards the opposite end of the station, also with whistles and klaxons, hooters, cheering and whistles. Their colour seemed to be yellow: yellow hats and yellow flags. When the Reds caught sight of the Yellows pandemonium broke loose. Individuals broke free from both sides and hurled themselves at each other, kicking and clawing at one another and police and dogs struggled to keep them apart. Clearly the Reds and the Yellows were sworn enemies. The Reds shouting out, ‘Niggers, niggers, niggers!’ and the Yellows replied, ‘Yids, yids, yids!’ Blanchaille was reminded of the tremendous battles which took place between Fascists and Jews on the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday on the pavement outside the beer cellars in the capital. The hatred they clearly felt for one another was so reminiscent of the life he had left, that for a moment he was overwhelmed with feelings of homesickness, even a kind of strange nostalgia. A train arrived and the Reds were allowed aboard. The Yellows were held back on the platform. No doubt they had their separate train.
As Blanchaille arrived at Trafalgar Square station I saw how a succession of young girls came up to him. ‘Business, business,’ they said repeatedly. This puzzled Blanchaille who could not imagine what girls so young could be doing in such a place, so late at night.
The crowds pressing around him as the escalator rose slowly towards the light wore ecclesiastical costumes as if got up to resemble old religious pictures. He saw a bishop, a scattering of cardinals, a bevy of virgins in blue veils. It was only when he peered closely that he saw their stubbled chins and realised they were all men. They clustered behind Blanchaille on the escalator whispering, perhaps to each other, perhaps to themselves, perhaps it wasn’t even they who spoke but only voices inside his head, but from wherever the words came they scandalised him. Their talk was of organs and orifices, of anal chic, of comings and goings, of tongues, testicles, of ruptures, lesions and sphincters, of AIDS, herpes and hepatitis, of pancake make-up and the versatility of latex, of leather and the ethics of climactic simulation and of the lover of some unfortunate creature who had lost her life, head smashed with a heavy hammer when it was discovered that she was not he pretending, coiffed and beguiling, but the very her she had been pretending to be. ‘Come over to our side ducks and get the feel of life!’ These ribald remarks caused a great deal of mirth among the knot of purpled cardinals whose faces, he saw, were painted dead white with large black eyes so that they looked like Japanese actors. The long staircase creaked its way upwards to the dirty patch of light above. Of course it was all too likely that these scenes took place only in his imagination and the crowds around him were perfectly ordinary people returning from walks in the country, and scout outings and the girls so desperate for business were collecting for charity. But that his imagination should run in these channels at such a time worried him deeply.
And then he was up in the Square. He saw the column with Nelson on top of it. He saw the fountains, he saw buildings which reminded him very much of the campus of the Christian National University with its predilection for the neo-Grecian temple style and then directly across the road he saw the sign of the golden springbuck. (You must note here, if you will, how typical were Blanchaille’s feelings of excitement and ignorance, the feelings of an innocent abroad. Had he known it, the dangers he imagined in the underground were as nothing compared with the perils which now faced him.) He gazed up at the large corner building, the Embassy squat and solid, that old box of ashes and bones as it was called by that celebrated dissident, the Methodist missionary Ernest Wickham (and he should have known, since he was widely credited with having burgled the Embassy and taken away sensitive papers which were later passed to the Azanian Liberation Front). A daring triumph, but shortlived, for a little while later Wickham received a parcel from a favourite Methodist mission in the Kalahari, where much of his fieldwork had taken place. Wickham made the mistake of opening the parcel and was blown into smaller bits than would fill a small plastic bag, given that hair, teeth, bones and odd gobbits of flesh were dutifully collected notwithstanding. The bomb, it was suggested, might have come from the Pen Pals Division of the Bureau which had long exploited the exiles’ weakness for welcoming parcels from home. (It should be noted here that the Regime had since commemorated the work of Pen Pals Division of the Bureau with the issue of a special stamp showing on an aquamarine background a large plain parcel wrapped in brown paper and neatly tied up with string. In the lefthand corner the keen-eyed observer will spot the tiny letters ‘PP’, which, he will now know, do not stand for postage paid.)
Sitting in a high window of the Embassy was Dirk Heiden, the so-called South African super-spy, a sobriquet well earned. This formidable man worked himself into the top job of the Students Advisory Bureau, a Swiss-based organisation promoting the aims of radical students abroad, particularly exiled students from the South African townships, a post which he held for some eighteen months in which time he took part in freedom marches in Lagos against the racism of the Regime and was photographed taking a sleigh ride in the Moscow snow. From his office in Geneva he monitored the activities of resistance groups, anti-war objectors and other dissidents abroad, tailing them, taping them, photocopying documents and insinuating himself into the clandestine councils of various radicals abroad who seemed as free with their secrets as they were with their brandy. As a result of his reports many at home were beaten, imprisoned, stripped, manacled and tortured. Heiden had returned home to the kind of triumphant reception normally accorded only to rugby teams or visiting pop-singers who had defied the international ban against appearances likely to benefit the Regime. But his hour of glory over, he fell prey to the boredom which so often affects those who have lived too long abroad. He grew fat and listless, developed a drink problem, was arrested for firing his pistol at passers-by, pined for his tie-maker and his old sophisticated life, and so his superiors returned him to an overseas post, a chair in the window of an upstairs room in the Embassy where he peered through the glass searching the Square for familiar faces.
Heiden sat in a chair by the window, so still he might have been dead. His weight had continued to increase, his facial skin was stretched tight and shining over the bones, it had the texture of rubber on a beach ball blown up to bursting point. He stared out of the window because it was his job to look at people who visit the Square below, look for faces he might recognise, for it is a well-known fact that South Africans abroad will come and stand silently outside their Embassy, prompted perhaps by the same impulses that bring early morning observers to wait outside the walls of a prison where a hanging is to take place, or crowds to stand outside the palace walls when the monarch is dying.