RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

Radical Middle | 213
two-metre new-brooms scouring every corner and pointing
out the correct Stateside way of doing everything better. She
and her husband, brilliant balladeer roger Lucey, were about
to head off to cape Town anyway. I think she found Frontline
easier to leave than it had been.
Why was I supine through this? I don’t know. There was fog.
I spent day and night, sometimes stretches of more than 24
hours, writing a book that went in circles, vanishing up its own
orifices.
fatherhood saved the day. christmas ’89 we took our children
to my parents in the cape, and our car broke down. and the
breakdown had knock-on effects and the knock-ons had more
effects.
When we were back in Johannesburg, weeks later, and I
contemplated circular Book 3, b, I responded reflexively. My
fingers, unbidden, started to do something different. They
started to write about the car breaking down.
It was almost like journalism, dealing with the real world, the
world as it was, idiosyncratic and crazy and fun and beautiful.
I couldn’t imagine what I would do with this story, but the
fingers flew. and what-next thoughts stayed buttoned-up; they
could wait a little.
at home, in solitude, midday on the second of february,
fingers were flying when Keith Lister phoned to congratulate
me. congratulate me? for what? It turned out to be a fairly
blanket sort of congratulation, for people who had argued that
apartheid had to go. I was at sea. He said: “Didn’t you hear?
apartheid is over, fW killed it.”
I ran for the TV, They were already re-running fW de Klerk
at parliament’s podium, declaring the New South africa open.
That moment will be re-run for hundreds of years. Never has
there been a higher point in a nation’s history.
The next Sunday, like everyone, we sat at a screen, waiting
and waiting until a figure walked down a prison driveway hand
in hand with Winnie. everybody took a moment in shock,
including cameramen splaying in search of someone who