RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

188 | denis beckett
especially in a place that disallowed women, but that’s where
the club came from. They had blackballed afrikaners; they had
blackballed Jews. Persons with pigment and persons without
penises weren’t in consideration. But they’d re-thought, for
instance after afrikaner councillors put a bus rank at their
doorstep, and formerly blackballed Jewish traders gobbled up
a formerly dominant empire, and a fellow named Tutu became
Bishop of Johannesburg, their ex-officio honorary chaplain.
By the late ‘80s what mattered was a suit. You could be
any colour, any gender, any tribe, but you couldn’t be a man
without a suit. I was in my suit, for the occasion; made me feel
important. Jolyon and I had a fine meal and resolved one more
time that we needed more of this and more of that, a push here
and a shove there. afterwards while we waited in the foyer
for Jolyon’s driver to make his way through the downpour, I
snapped and said we didn’t need more push and more shove,
we needed a total recasting. Jolyon snapped in turn and said
perhaps we should quit. I said fine, and there it was.
The air in Jolyon’s Mercedes was colder than the air outside
was wet, and when we got to Sauer Street I was too uptight to
ask his driver, a guy named Samson Maila whom I’d known for
twenty years, to take me back to Mayfair, where we had moved.
I ducked and skidded from eve to awning until I found a bus
stop and there I sheltered in the doorway of edura House to
wait for a bus.
The doorway is twenty paces off the road, across a mini-piazza,
and not a lot of bus drivers are scanning distant doorways for
potential passengers, so when I saw a bus coming I’d dart out
to meet it. But Mayfair is on the way to the bus yards, so four
out of five buses are going off duty. I was scurrying across the
piazza to meet oncoming buses that sailed past, and scurrying
back until the next one came, and getting wetter with each
foray, and finally when the Mayfair bus hove up that was the
one I did not get to. I stood in the rain and watched it disappear,
and looked for a callbox to get Nomavenda to fetch me.
When I found a callbox it was vandalised, so I popped in to