Double Negative (7 page)

‘You mean every student commune has its own native village? What do they do for their keep
–
gather firewood? tend the cattle?'

In most of the houses I knew, the people ‘at the back' brawled among themselves and the people ‘in the house' insisted on keeping the peace. The intelligentsia, lightly dusted with Social Anthropology, confronting the lumpenproletariat, thoroughly steeped in Late Harvest. I remembered Linda staunching a knife wound in a woman's back with a beach towel while I called for an ambulance that did not come (it was Friday night). In the end, we loaded her into Benjy's Beetle, wrapped in towels and a groundsheet from someone's hiking kit, and drove her to the hospital ourselves, and Linda talked to her the whole way to keep her conscious. The next day her husband, grateful and contrite, washed the cars in full and final settlement of their
debt.

But I couldn't say any of this to Brookes. Every story I could tell to clarify my situation only confirmed the point he was making. The order we lived in was perverse. It could not be improved upon; it had to be overthrown. Kindness did not help. Guilt and responsibility were not the same thing.

Later, as we were rinsing our mouths out with bitter little coffees, Auerbach said, ‘Veronica will find it easier to raise two children than three.'

Brookes's mouth turned down in clownish dismay, but before he could speak, Auerbach went on, ‘That's what she said, anyway. Poor woman. I suppose it makes her feel better.'

The mask, the thing that could have been a scrap of rubber torn from a doll's head, was in fact a face. The other bits and pieces were easier to identify as human
–
a foot in a shoe, a hand with the fingers curled, intact. There was even a ring on the middle finger. The rest was meat and cotton waste.

He had not been run down by History or the Movement: he had been blown up by a bomb. He was planting a bomb outside a police station when it detonated prematurely and tore his body to pieces. There was nothing metaphorical about it. Thinking in metaphors is not always a good idea. It was Benjy who rebuked me for the habit one night when we'd both had one too many. ‘You can call it an empty barrel if you like. You can say, “This conversation is an empty barrel.” But what's the point? Why not just say what you mean? Maybe I'll get it then. Give me a sporting chance.'

I swallowed the sea water in the back of my mouth and leaned closer to the photograph. It was a cutting from a newspaper, covered in clear plastic like a school project and stuck to the wall above the urinal where you could not fail to see it, standing there with a soft target in your hand, your
manhood
. Alongside was a typed sheet
–
BE ON THE ALERT
–
explaining that it was my responsibility to keep my eyes open and report suspicious packages to the Manager, in brackets Raul. The man who took the snap out of the snapper. The picture seemed to me like the conclusion of an argument, the coup de grâce. But whose argument? Perhaps it was just a lesson in looking. I was too inclined to turn my head away, it was in my nature and my upbringing. I buttoned my fly and washed my hands at the basin. Then I went back to the cutting and made myself look at it squarely.

In search of the second house, the one he had pulled out of the hat on Langermann Kop, Auerbach drove us back to Bez Valley. Brookes made me sit in front as if it was a special treat, so that he could stretch out in the back with his eyes closed. Auerbach switched on the radio, although he did not need to tune me out. We were all distracted. The house in Emerald Street had proved the magnanimity of chance so fully it hardly seemed fair to test it again.

We rumbled down the long hot avenues.

There's the cover of his book!
–
I thought
–
it's that picture of Uncle Doug's, I swear. But I held my tongue. Just as there was no point anticipating a photograph Auerbach might still take, so there was no point recognizing one he had taken already. What could one say about it? Snap! And
then?

He's playing a game
–
I thought this too
–
he's having some fun. All this wandering around the city is nothing less than a guided tour of the places he's captured on film. He's letting us know we're on his turf. There! That place with the palm tree! And what about that one covered in ivy? It was like counting caravans, Gypsy caravans like our own, when we drove down to the coast on holiday, a game my father dreamed up to keep me occupied when I got bored and restless. Who'll be the first to see the
sea?

When we pulled up outside the house in Fourth Avenue, I had a more cynical thought: is this really the place he picked from up on the koppie? Neither Brookes nor I can contradict him. He might have chosen it this minute, relying on those intuitions he makes so much of. All you can say for certain is that the roof is green. Racing green.
Groendakkies
.

While Auerbach went to see if anyone was home, and Brookes got out of the car to stretch and peel the fabric of his shirt off his belly like dead skin, I strolled a little way along the pavement to look at the house next door. My choice. It was as long and narrow as one side of a semi, a place that had lost its better half. The half left behind was yellow. A dozen steps led up to a stoep with a metal railing of diamonds and quoits. Beside the gate was a letterbox with a pitched roof and a chimney standing on an iron plinth like a maquette of the larger structure: they matched one another perfectly, down to the orange tiles and the red door. I could not wait to see what was behind that door. It might take another man's charm to pass through it, but the choice was
mine.

Then Auerbach came back to the car to fetch his bags and invite us in. This knack for getting people to open up surprised me less the second time round.

Mrs Ditton lumbered ahead of us down the passage, swaying at every step to sweep one thigh past another, almost brushing the walls. We followed her into the lounge. The room was lined with dressers and display cabinets, and for all its clutter peculiarly hushed and drained, like a little-visited annex in a museum. I remember stepping lightly from a patterned rug on to dark floorboards, aware that all around things were asleep on their shadows. Even Brookes took the boom out of his voice. Set out in cabinets of coffin wood and pillared glass were toby jugs and cruet sets, upturned port glasses, cut-glass dishes, fragile and flowery ornaments, iced frivolities for wedding cakes in lilac, rose and leaf green. Of course, you cannot see these shades in Auerbach's photograph, although the black and white is perfect for lacquered wood and tarnished mirror. The ball-and-claw suite is ankle-deep in shadow, the curtains are so densely grained they could be carved from the same heavy wood as the furniture. There is a murderer behind every
one.

An object stood out in the gloom: a low coffee table with a cracked
top.

‘Is this from a lorry?' Brookes asked incredulously, shifting aside a pewter urn on a tea cloth. Now I also saw the table for what it was: a windscreen welded at each of its four corners to a shell casing.

‘A hippo,' she said. The flesh of her arms shook with laughter.

‘Military vehicle,' Auerbach glossed it for him, ‘troop carrier.' After a glance at the table, he went back to rifling out the legs of the tripod.

‘They drove over a landmine with Jimmy inside.'

‘Jimmy?'

‘My
son.'

She watched Auerbach suspiciously. I saw that the pads of her bare feet were so thick and round that her toes did not touch the floor when she stood still. She seemed to be balancing on pontoons. Only her hair was stiff and angular, arriving swiftly at contradictory points below her ears. It looked like a hairstyle she had copied from Jackie Kennedy and forgotten to change.

‘Was he killed?'

‘No, thank God. I always say to him, Jimmy, God was watching your back. His mates had broken bones and stuff, but he walked away without a scratch. That's why they gave it to him when he klaared
out.'

So this piece of scrap was a good luck charm. Or a medal.

I had a look around with Mrs Ditton at my shoulder. Jimmy's room was easy to spot: he had a Kawasaki poster on the door and Farrah Fawcett-Majors above the bed. The room smelt of fish. In the channel between the bed and the wall lay a clutter of flippers, tanks and masks crusted with sea sand, and a couple of wetsuits like bloated body parts. A speargun leaned against a wardrobe. Jimmy was a diver in Port Nolloth, his mother told me, but he'd been called up to the border again and so he'd brought his gear home. Couldn't leave it in Port Jolly, it would all be swiped. He loved the sea, she said, even as a baby you couldn't get him out of the water. Swimming before he could walk. It was a crying shame they wouldn't take him in the navy because of his
feet.

Auerbach called her for the
shot.

The main bedroom was as gloomy as the lounge. A pair of brogues, side by side under the bed, polished for a funeral. The suit they went with was on a round-shouldered dumb valet. Through a window, I saw the window of the house next door, almost close enough to touch and so perfectly aligned it might have been a reflection. I shifted aside the edge of a net curtain and saw that the window opposite had venetian blinds tilted against the outside world. I could not imagine what was going on in that room. Anything was possible. Everything.

Brookes was like a visitor in a museum whose point he cannot fathom. He stooped to look at objects on the lower shelves of the cabinets and ran his fingers over the embossed spines of a set of encyclopedias. He paused in the doorways of the rooms as if they were spanned by chains, leaning in for a better view. There must be something interesting here, his attitude suggested, perhaps it's hidden in the corner over there. In the kitchen, where the makings of a stew lay on a chopping board, he held a chunk of butternut up to the light as if looking for a flaw. Once he fanned himself with his notebook, but wrote nothing in
it.

When I returned to the lounge, Auerbach had the focusing cloth over his head. For a moment, the darkness seemed to emanate from him, running out from under the stifling hood. Then the flow reversed and the cloth appeared to be soaking up the shadows that had lain there already. Mrs Ditton sat in the armchair beside the fireplace. The coffee table had been dragged away
–
there is no trace of it in the photograph
–
to expose the floorboards and a corner of the rug. Looming on the left is the largest of the cabinets, so imposing you would say it belongs in a department store. The chair has wooden arms with ledges for teacups and on each of these lies a pie-crust of crochet work and a coaster. The chair sprawls with its arms open wide and its fists clenched, and she wallows in its
lap.

Auerbach shrugged off the cloth and stood beside the camera with the cable release in his hand. The shadows scuttled and settled again. He waited for something to happen. Or not happen. Something imperceptible to the rest of us had to become clear before he could release the shutter. Twice he stepped away from the camera and looked towards the door with a grimace, as if the situation pained him and he had made up his mind to leave. This caused her to look at the door enquiringly as if someone had just knocked.

I imagined the door opening, I imagined the room opening rather than the door, the door standing still while the house swung away on small hinges and closed into the eye of the camera with a bang. Patience, something is bound to happen. And if nothing does? That is unthinkable. We cannot be left here in this half-formed state.

While my thoughts were elsewhere, Auerbach took the picture. For only the second time that day, the shutter fell through the moment like a guillotine. You can see the relief on Mrs Ditton's face as she drops from the fulness of life into a smaller, diminished immortality. She looks grateful to have the air knocked out of her. Anticipating a paper-thin future, she floats free of the fat-thighed cushions and the sticky shadows, she levitates. It is there in the photograph, you have only to
look.

For a moment after the picture was taken, she was reluctant to leave the chair. Captured and released in the same instant, she was unsure of her will. She had two destinies now. One of them she still occupied, the other had stepped away from her; it was receding into the past, but with its face turned to the future. She hovered in the chair, unblinking, afraid to move a muscle, as if stirring would smudge that other body in the camera and she needed to match it for as long as possible to preserve a resemblance.

For the first time since the game with the houses started, Auerbach's spirits sagged. Some charge had gone out of him and into the camera, which stood there primed and ticking. Still, I heard him laughing as he chatted to Mrs Ditton and wrote in his notebook. Where do you come from? All these years, hey? What's that Jimmy of yours up to? And
Mr
Ditton? Have you ever worked? Do you get a pension? With questions that opened into the rest of her life, into her complications, she was charmed back into the well-lit room of the present.

I went on to the stoep and fired up my old man's briar. Through the bay window, I had a new view of the lounge. Standing there alone, the camera looked like a detached observer, an expert on a fact-finding mission, with its chin up and its eye steady, drawing its own conclusions.

Auerbach entered the picture and began to dismantle the device, while Mrs Ditton floated on the edge of the frame. Now that it really was done, the pose abandoned once and for all, she wanted us out of the house, that was clear, she was like a woman hurrying her lover from her bed, urging him to be gone before her husband comes home from work. Her eye kept flicking over the shelves and table tops, dusting and adjusting, measuring the spaces between knick-knacks to assure herself that nothing had been taken.