lights while there was running and screaming, terrible, and then that noise, that noise! something falling hard, just like that, heavy at the door, so I thought what if itâs Colin, he wasnât home yetâ
Billboards on bare ground proclaimed the right to shelter elevated to middle-class status. Easy Loans Available, Protea Grove, Blue Horizon, Hill Park, you too can say you live in a place with a beautiful name like a white suburb, you too can feel you are making a claim for yourself when your address is Phambili Parkâforward, let us go forward! Now on the horizon, a vast unloading of scrap without any recognizable profile of human habitations, now at the roadside, the jagged tin and tattered plastic sheets that are the architecture of the late twentieth century as marble was the material of the Renaissance, glass and steel that of Mies van der Rohe; the squatter camps, the real Post-Modernism: of the homeless.
âOh sorryâturn here, no, left, sorryâ Such an apologetic young woman, with her oval face, varnished olive by the mixture of races, in its corolla of springy black hair. Is she apologizingfor existing at all, neither white and living far from the wrath that overflows from the black hostels into a fake suburbia nor black and fleeing into the veld from a burning shack? âand I heard someone groaning there outside and what can I do, my mom was trying to stop me, I thought what if itâs Colin so even I get killed I mustâ
Ben was shocked. Thatâs not the kind of attitude youâd expect to have towards young married people. Hurt. Ben, who had been Bennet, the young man who took someone elseâs wife while the man was away at war, had fear disguised as disapproval in his face, the withdrawal in his eyes in their dark caves. He did not want his son to suffer any complications in the search for sexual fulfilment and companionship that beckons from that other billboard: Happiness.
On a straggle of wire clothes were dripping, a woman flung a basin of water to the ground and looked up, a white flag on a dead-branch pole announced something to the initiatedâa healer or some other form of counsel for sale, or maybe mealies to be boughtâabove a shack leaning like a house of cards. Business going on; straggling letters on board or wavering across the corrugations of tin, New York Gents Tailor, Dry Cleaning Depot, Latest Hairstyle Braiding Afro Relaxing, Mosala Funerals, Beauty Salon, a shutter propping up an eyelid of tin where a handful of cigarettes, a few bottles of bright drinks, twists of snuff and dice of chewing gum were ranged. Store. Coal Wood. Turn here. Turn there.
Oh Mrs Stark.
Combis have widened and channelled the dirt road to the passage of a river in flood, the Legal Foundation station-wagon is carried along, keeping track as the combis draw level so close the elbow of the driver out of his window almost touches the arm of the station-wagonâs outside mirror; held back when the combis stop at speed, without warning, to take on or discharge a passenger.
âOh Mrs Stark, I tell you a person canât go through that, he canât. When I saw it wasnât Colin, when I opened the door just a bit and I saw the head, the black man, blood, and the brainsâ
Crying, and all she has to deal with the shock and horror come back to her in the telling is a fancy handkerchief patterned with a pierrotâs head, his two crystal tears printed tinsel: Mrs Stark sees as she turns in the gesture of acknowledgement that is all Mrs Stark has to deal with it. For the moment; the Foundation must not flounder in effects, it tackles causes.
âlike at the butcherâs shop, I never knew our brains was like thatâ
There is no stain on the doorstep. Neither blood nor the red-veined jelled grey displayed in shallow pans. All has been scrubbed away in the desperate upkeep of housewifely standards. A tall woman is waiting, bony in the way that often
Billboards on bare ground proclaimed the right to shelter elevated to middle-class status. Easy Loans Available, Protea Grove, Blue Horizon, Hill Park, you too can say you live in a place with a beautiful name like a white suburb, you too can feel you are making a claim for yourself when your address is Phambili Parkâforward, let us go forward! Now on the horizon, a vast unloading of scrap without any recognizable profile of human habitations, now at the roadside, the jagged tin and tattered plastic sheets that are the architecture of the late twentieth century as marble was the material of the Renaissance, glass and steel that of Mies van der Rohe; the squatter camps, the real Post-Modernism: of the homeless.
âOh sorryâturn here, no, left, sorryâ Such an apologetic young woman, with her oval face, varnished olive by the mixture of races, in its corolla of springy black hair. Is she apologizingfor existing at all, neither white and living far from the wrath that overflows from the black hostels into a fake suburbia nor black and fleeing into the veld from a burning shack? âand I heard someone groaning there outside and what can I do, my mom was trying to stop me, I thought what if itâs Colin so even I get killed I mustâ
Ben was shocked. Thatâs not the kind of attitude youâd expect to have towards young married people. Hurt. Ben, who had been Bennet, the young man who took someone elseâs wife while the man was away at war, had fear disguised as disapproval in his face, the withdrawal in his eyes in their dark caves. He did not want his son to suffer any complications in the search for sexual fulfilment and companionship that beckons from that other billboard: Happiness.
On a straggle of wire clothes were dripping, a woman flung a basin of water to the ground and looked up, a white flag on a dead-branch pole announced something to the initiatedâa healer or some other form of counsel for sale, or maybe mealies to be boughtâabove a shack leaning like a house of cards. Business going on; straggling letters on board or wavering across the corrugations of tin, New York Gents Tailor, Dry Cleaning Depot, Latest Hairstyle Braiding Afro Relaxing, Mosala Funerals, Beauty Salon, a shutter propping up an eyelid of tin where a handful of cigarettes, a few bottles of bright drinks, twists of snuff and dice of chewing gum were ranged. Store. Coal Wood. Turn here. Turn there.
Oh Mrs Stark.
Combis have widened and channelled the dirt road to the passage of a river in flood, the Legal Foundation station-wagon is carried along, keeping track as the combis draw level so close the elbow of the driver out of his window almost touches the arm of the station-wagonâs outside mirror; held back when the combis stop at speed, without warning, to take on or discharge a passenger.
âOh Mrs Stark, I tell you a person canât go through that, he canât. When I saw it wasnât Colin, when I opened the door just a bit and I saw the head, the black man, blood, and the brainsâ
Crying, and all she has to deal with the shock and horror come back to her in the telling is a fancy handkerchief patterned with a pierrotâs head, his two crystal tears printed tinsel: Mrs Stark sees as she turns in the gesture of acknowledgement that is all Mrs Stark has to deal with it. For the moment; the Foundation must not flounder in effects, it tackles causes.
âlike at the butcherâs shop, I never knew our brains was like thatâ
There is no stain on the doorstep. Neither blood nor the red-veined jelled grey displayed in shallow pans. All has been scrubbed away in the desperate upkeep of housewifely standards. A tall woman is waiting, bony in the way that often
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