Extrange

Another one of us got married on the long lawns this weekend, with the sunburned shoulders of the women in their spaghetti straps and the galvanized iron tubs full of fine bottled beer sweating while we drank and waited for photos and what came next.

I saw their pasts in all the guests; I was confounded with the narrow escapes, the nine lives, the things you can’t see on the outside. I wanted to grab J and point to each of them, tell him how each one was special. You see that guy? He used to have cancer. But he doesn’t anymore. And look at her, that girl. The one with the silver shoes. Her uncle used to hold the record for pissing across the street outside the Star of the West. And those two. Jeez. They tried to burn the school down once, but they found them in time.

We sat at one immense table covered in white linen and set for a banquet; there were quartets of glasses gathered at each place, giant roses weeping their petals onto a hundred plates. The sun set. We were together in a strange place for the first time in our lives, the old Kimberley families. We ate and drank and the dead fathers and missing sons chewed and swallowed with us. After all the courses we moved our chairs back like Lazarus and moved in a living crowd to the dance floor. There the ghosts left us: they must have: for a bit there was only silence: no knuckles and kneecaps clicked beside us like castanets: the only grin was the wide one on the groom’s face.

He stood alone on the dance floor in front of the band. Someone had given him a guitar and he moved smoothly with it even in his tuxedo. Their first dance was a serenade. He sang a verse from a David Gray song and his voice was young and rough and he didn’t care if he looked silly, and because he didn’t care he didn’t look silly at all: Be-mine-be-mine. She stood two feet away from him, corseted with happiness in her rust-coloured silk, her hands in loose joyful fists against the material to stop herself leaping into the air.

Later, after everything, the father of the groom was standing like a messenger against the door to the outside. When we tried to pass him he grabbed my partner by the arm. He leaned in close to us, and his age spots were livid in the flashing lights from the dance floor. ‘Don’t,’ he said in a hushed advisory tone, ‘don’t let her think she’s got you. Don’t ever let her think that.’ J looked at him and shook his arm free gently, and then we went on outside to lie in the sweet long grass because we were too drunk to drive anywhere and the night was fine; Papa Don’t Preach blared from the speakers.

I saw him again, the old man, just before we made our way home. His wife had found him. She was leading him onto the dance floor, and they had always been together. And meek and mild he was following her, blushing (Be-mine-be-mine) like a bride.

When the three men filed into the room they could have been anywhere: a dining room, a waiting room, a courtroom rank with sweat.
It was the middle man’s hips that gave him away, the sharp heel of his boot that tapped out time. The audience knew from the first twang, the ribbed sigh of the metal - but more than that: they knew from the plainsong human voice, from the hard-pressed innard and gizzard. (Sometimes the man in black held the accordion softly on his knee but didn’t play at all. He moved its lungs so that it only sighed, the warm air of the ages moving through to man his fingers. Its bone buttons flashed in the spotlight like funeral jewels.)
It took them all back to the prairie, to the open spaces, when you could still choose. He sang ballad after ballad, and ballads are stories, are desperate letters, are messages from the grave.
Behind the three musical men there were sepia photographs of the old diggers next to their coffins. It was a joke, or it wasn’t. There they were. And sometimes when Weir held still he flattened himself into the paper so that he stood with the dead men at the vanished saloon, stood beside his own coffin, stood by the pale woman who was holding her ghost baby loosely to her bodice, as if it was already gone before and she held only its shadow. Or else it was that the men in the photographs came out onto the stage. There they bloomed and grew like sea sponges, whole and rosy, a drowned regretful garden, until they were thrown up onto the boards of the theatre itself, dazzled, a little awkward, their tongues grown thick from the dried root in the mouth, the cemetery bouquets crumbled dusty in their hands.
Whichever way it was, they had been called up, and so they stood there, ranged before the bland pigling audience - the muffled middle housewife with her toe-tapping white-haired man (in his head he is Billy and Jesse and Wild Bill, with the triple trigger finger tingling: how it takes him back, and back, and back, to some otherwhere before he had a house and insurance and a heavy car in the parking lot and there was none of this, only the white split-pole railing, and the sound of approaching horses, and the dust).
Weir stood there, this sizzling man, struck over and over by kindly lightning. When he showed his teeth the women in the audience tittered. They wanted him, or what he had, and knew that they wanted him, and what he had, and they were excited and afraid. And all the while he was fingering the archetypal tunes, stroking the old familiar keys, the bars and rope, the hopelessness, the knowing that everything you have ever done has finally dwindled down to this point, this silver reckoning moment, and no one will come for you – not your father or your mother, or your own true love – except to watch you hang, and that was in the morning.
(He said in a newspaper that someone ought to be singing about Dina Rodrigues and the mystery of murder, but the papers have only been printing the biographies of the men who had to get up close to kill the baby - that singular image of the infant with her pierced ears and her rosary! The accused men sit in court with the hunched shoulders of the found-out, the hard-done-by, the mystified. The reports outline their childhoods full of poverty, their abuse at the hands of others, the logic that makes us all murderers. But it’s Dina who has no ballad; it’s Dina they can’t explain.)
But it’s really the lady who sat next to us at the show that I want to talk about.
Oh, this woman. She couldn’t stop. She was laughing, all the way through, huffing and puffing as Weir sang old ballads and new, as he picked out the cracked notes from ‘Amazing Grace’ and his throat shrank down to its tendons. (Sometimes he held his head skywards, as if the notes were going over the skulls of the people who watched him.) That woman. She knew there was something in the room that she could not name, like a false medium, like a table-rapper at a supper séance. She knew it was there and she could not say what it was. (She would lie awake in the night after and wonder what it was that she couldn’t say, how words could fail her when music didn’t, though she knew no instrument and even her husband’s freckled back was dead to her fingers in the darkness, mute as meat and turned against her. She knew something of the jail cell then, and the waiting for the sun to rise.)
Weir once took off his black hat. Beneath it the hair had bristled bravely, but out there under the lights his scalp showed pinkly through. With a sweep of his hand he divested himself of the West, and was ordinary again, like the people who sat before him and gaped. He made himself ordinary, though what had fallen from his mouth was not.
In the end they just came to an abrupt halt, because there is no way to end it but cleanly. Weir stood still and the pudgy man dressed all in black, with his six guitars and his heart attack, looked up cautious as a squirrel now that they were done with the music, or the music was done with them. The musicians looked up, dazzled, awkward, thrown up from the rosy gardens, the wet regret, the past.

Dear Michael -

You are fourteen hours old. You have been slapped and wrapped in blankies; your mother has frowned on the footage; your father is grinning from ear to pinkish ear. He is currently making us stand outside on the verandah while he passes round a cherry-flavoured cheroot. I have a head cold; it makes the sound of the ocean seem further away than it is; it makes people less interested in tonguing the cheroot when it’s their turn. The moon shifts on the water, like you could walk over it all the way to Hangklip, like anything is possible. It is older than you. It is older than anything you can imagine, wrinkled as the soles of your feet.
Miguel, Mikhail, Mickey Mouse, Mickey Finn: naming babies is easier than naming cats, but not much. Michael is a good one, I think. Your father, whose family names run to makes of cheese (’And not the town in the Eastern Cape!’), announced one night a few months ago that he was going to name you Super-Duper Colchester Hooper. He was less impressed with our response: What about Pooper-Scooper Colchester Hooper?
Whatever you will be called by people who love you and people who don’t, for now you are still at Vincent Pallotti, humped like an earthworm into your incubator. So many babies in that room, said your sister before she was hustled off to bed. What she meant was, So many babies, and I was one of them. So many of them, and how do you tell which is your own, your special one, different from all the others? How can you ever be sure? The change still escapes us, infant all the way up (even now when I am on the train in the morning I cannot believe I am the same person who was making tea, naked, an hour ago, that an hour ago every one of us on the train was doing something else).
We forget because we have to. If we remembered each thing it would make us crazy with time sickness and distraction. People seem obliged to say this at a birth, and I am one of them, even though it’s hard to say what it is exactly that I think you should know - about your dad, about the world. (I don’t know what to feel, he says, starry and dazed. I have nothing to compare it to.)
We’re glad you’re here, all of us godfathers, godmothers. There’s been so much already - our old lives disparate as arteries but coming to the same place - and still so much more to come: the warm travelling, the swollen feet, the juggling of finances and tokens of trust (the old coins mixed in with the new, the family trove).
But for now there is this fulcrum, the cold verandah, the old moon a sliver away from full.
Forgive your parents for what they are about to do in the name of their love and discipline. Forgive them for falling back on the old sayings in the new kingdom: While you’re under my roof. Don’t do as I do. This hurts me more than it hurts you.
Come on in, Michael H, even though it’s hard in these parts. Come on over; don’t give up on us now.

We were early with nerves. We sat in the McDonald’s across the road and drank their thin hot chocolate, and through the plate glass windows people’s breath steamed in the November air. Inside, my little brother pulled at his necktie and paced up and down, practising his own warm speech under his breath, and the crown of his head seemed to touch the ceiling. And if he had elongated, had seen the stars, then somewhere I must have grown taller, too.
A grey couple was lodged at a spindly table, fussing with their newspapers, and I pitied them and thought, Who comes here except to waste time before something else? And then the woman stood up and turned to me and smiled. Her hair fizzed up around her face and her teeth were white, forensic and gleaming, splitting her face with her happiness, and I was ashamed.
Outside in the street all the trees were branching green and defiant against the frost, and we marched across the zebra crossings. My brother held his arm against the front of my body, held the traffic back like Moses and the sea, and as we walked we took up the whole pavement. Before us there were ghost retinues, slaves carrying jewels on their heads, processions of frankincense, of myrrh; as I once carried the ashes of my mother in a wooden box in my hands I carried her now in some other contained part – not reduced or scattered, but whole and watchful and present.
We knew we were getting closer because there was food on our shoes. The rice was scattered as if it had fallen from a sack carried by a child sent on a giant errand, wondering as he went at how much easier the task had become, the burden lighter and lighter, as if the sack weighed nothing at all. There were only a few grains at first, and then more and more until eventually there was a white cascade trampled into the pavement, and then it became confetti, and last of all it was transformed into rose petals, precious enough to scatter only around the dark entrance to the Lambeth Registry Office in downtown Brixton.
My sister and her girlfriend stood shoulder to shoulder a little way in; they gripped their bouquets tightly, like shepherds in a Christmas pageant, and the flowers bloomed in their bindings. The two women smiled and smiled, their cheeks shiny and their bodies tucked neatly into tailored black dresses like dragonflies, like Jackie O, like every woken woman whose life has been revealed to her in one true moment.
Around them streamed the ordinary business of the office - other families with baby carriages, the light bouncing off the new skulls, smooth and thin as eggshells; the dim room opposite, where the mourning chairs were lined against the walls in rows, like a movie house before the lights go down and the reels of grief are wound and unwound.
But in the magistrate’s office across the way there was only their love and their excitement; when the two of them walked it cushioned their feet; when they talked it fell pinkly from their tongues. Love, they said. Honour. They faced the magistrate and the points of their white elbows showed backwards to the audience. They stood against the light from the french doors and we were blinded; we saw only their profiles, doubled like a Rorschach test.
The woman from McDonald’s was in the throng, live flowers pinned to her breast, and I understood that she was Lucy’s mother and the man who had sat at the little table was Lucy’s father, not reading the paper but rehearsing his sonnets for the ceremony: stagefright had rendered us unrecognisable to one another. We held our glasses of champagne and counted our new relatives, fingered the seams of marriage sewn up with this thread, this bloodless grateful lineage, and we knew that they must be doing the same. From across the room Lucy’s sister came to me and said shyly, We are your family, and then she pressed herself against me and I held the small cage of her bones in my arms.
When it grew dark there were fireworks over London; every evening for ten days afterwards there were the sounds of celebration and signs in the sky, but on this one night the moon rose clear and full, with the rabbit inside climbing its luminous walls.

There were hundreds of us gathered at the water; a couple of thousand, maybe. We stood on the sand there at the pavilion between the men on jetskis in the calm place beyond the waves, and then back towards the mountain where the shark-spotters on Boyes Drive scanned the sea like cowboys thirsty in the desert. The traffic for miles around was at a standstill; we had stepped sideways out of time, and only the sun moved.
The surfers lined up at Muizenberg, collecting around their boards in pockets, kicking at the sand and pushing each other. Kids were running through the forest of boards parked beside their owners, jagged as sharks’ teeth, white and silent. People were grinning at each other and they couldn’t stop. The Roxy girls muscled their boards along; they wore circlets of flowers on their heads like mermaids. ‘It looks unreal, man!’ the deejay’s voice kept pounding out. ‘Unreal!‘
He was right: it was unreal. It was, at the very least, gigantically hopeful and seriously silly. And it was a beautiful thing. One woman stood next to her surfboard with her hair still dry and lying loose to her waist. She jigged to the rock that was blasting out of the speakers all along the esplanade, and her hair rippled with her like a Chili Peppers song. All the while she did what we were all doing - watching the waves and waiting for the signal that the pulse was coming through, that there was a likely set.
The official world record is 46 people simultaneously surfing one wave; the unofficial record is more like 53. This Sunday was supposed to double that, to bring the record to South Africa, dudes, as the man said. Everyone listened and shivered and dripped snot that probably was only sea water, and they waited for further instructions. The little boy in front of me looked down as he hurried across the sand. His surfboard had its name stencilled across it: MIGHTY MOUSE. He himself was more drowned rat than mouse: his boy’s eyelashes were triangulated with wet and the freckles stood out on his cheeks like a Norman Rockwell painting. Over his head the paper kites trailed like airborne jellyfish, and the clouds lumped and grumped over Hangklip, hanging back, astounded.
After about twenty minutes the announcer yelled, ‘Boards UP!’ like an army sergeant, and all the surfboards wheeled upright like a picket fence. Then he lost his stern voice and yelled, ‘Into the water!’ and the surfers ran at the low waves, slowing as their medium changed, shouting with the cold. They hurled their boards down and threw their bodies on over them, and they were in.
There were about 280 people in those waves that foamed up like spit - so white the foam had its own reflection - and the youngest of them was seven, and the oldest (they say) was 68. They peppered the water, all the people in neoprene, boys and girls and men and women and brown and white in every combination; they shrank the horizon and the spectator whale that sported there, drawn by the music on the ocean floor, like that Larson cartoon with the whale singing ‘Louie, Louie’ into the scientists’ microphone.
The rule for qualifying for the Guiness Book of World Records states that everyone has to be on the same wave, and everyone has to stay upright for at least five seconds. It’s an irony that for everyone to get their turn on the wave, you have to surf by yourself; it’s the space between you that lets you get where you need to go. ‘Spread out!’ the deejay kept yelling. People took turns to say this over the sound system. ‘Spread out, guys. Like, to Gordon’s Bay on this side. To Mozambique.’ They kept breaking off to laugh.
The marshalls on jetskis were waiting for the pulse, making their way along the waves, and then they were swinging pink cloths over their heads like rodeo riders to signal that the next wave was The One. The counters stood like a hundred Canutes on the shore, sharpening their eyes.
Six times the surfers gathered and threw themselves into the foam; the false starts and the lost boards and the slippery surfaces of other people in the waves slowed them down, but the good humour of the watchers on the beach didn’t change in the face of this bizarre orchestration, the choreography, the deejay shouting like gym coach, ‘Like that! Just like that! Jump off! Let’s do it again!’
They beat the record - both official and unofficial - on every attempt except for the first, which was a split wave and divided the surfers. On the third attempt they counted 73 people on a single wave, all upright for at least five seconds. The surfers stood up on their boards, as smooth and slow as if they could stand forever, and they were holding their arms out like Russian gymnasts, like telephone poles, close enough to touch.
All in all it took about two hours; when I skipped home again it was after five and the sun was gone in Kalk Bay except for the bit over the harbour, where it always shines. I ran through the garden at Danger Beach that smells of fresh laundry - or maybe sun-dried cotton smells like fynbos - past all the dads in the parking lot with their chests like candle wax. They were standing proud and bisected by their towels, shivering and changing out of the open boots of their cars. They didn’t want to put the rest of their clothes on, or go home. They knew that they were going to lose this hot-dog-at-the-gala feeling, this smugness that made you sorry for every other person on the Earth who wasn’t there for it. They didn’t want Monday morning to come. I looked at them and I had that Auden poem stuck in my head, the one about Icarus in the waves, the crisis, the drowning, the pair of twinkling legs, and behind it all the unconscious ship that sailed calmly on.
It was real, you know? Nobody could sell it or airbrush it or market it with a dancing meerkat. It was happiness. One man peeled his wetsuit down to his waist and pressed his grey chest hair against his wife. She squealed and laughed, and then he danced her across the beach to the song in his head.
We could all hear that song, though it wasn’t pumping out over the speakers, each note a gong against the mountain and the sand. It was music from somewhere else, that lost place you thought you’d left behind. On Sunday afternoon the door to that place was opened a crack, and the undying music came pouring out of it over the water on the backs - not of whales or dolphins or mermaids - of plain old human beings.

You called me while I was walking up Station Road to the Cape Town office, late, blasted by pollen and the south-easter and thinking of devils and Dutchmen and the million changes to the first set of pages I had to make today. You called and laughed into my phone and said, ‘I smelled the jasmine this morning. I just wanted to say, Happy Spring.’
And because you were laughing you made me cradle the phone against my shoulder and laugh too, and the heels on my shoes evened out and my laptop weighed less and I was a girl again, there on the pavement, for everyone to see.
Ten years ago there was jasmine twining around the white burglar bars of your house on, yes, Spring Street. It felt like all the roads that led there were uphill, like a Doors song. But getting there was worth it. We were hiding out, in love and from it, and you showed me things about my body that I thought I hadn’t wanted to know. The bad things that came after that have stopped making me burn with the shame and the bladder infections. They’re just over. (Nothing is lost, but winter makes me forget where I stored those things, the love, the poky bedsprings; they are trapped like thin dresses, like silver sandals waiting in the gloom of the cupboard.)
We spoke about the dense dangerous life of cities, and our surprise that work can be happiness, and I walked all the while. What I didn’t tell you was that I had almost given up, that the angry bald men were getting closer, and I was afraid.
I attract these men; I must; I always have. Once I asked one what it was about me that had made him cycle, unasked, all the way over to my house in the southern suburbs and confess his love to me. ‘I saw it in the way you looked at me,’ he said, and he was shaking. ‘There was something in your eyes.’ Around us there were all the ghosts of boyfriends past and present; his friend, my lover, stood between us and I grabbed at his transparent sleeve. I thought that he might hide me, but my hands passed through him. The cyclist stood there instead, sweating with fright and frustration, solid and human and extraneous.
‘Why didn’t you wait for me?’ he pleaded.
What is there to say to that? Your own love is always natural and right; paedophiles think so; stalkers and axe-murderers do.
And now I’ve worked out what it is about the angry men that frightens me so much. They think that the world owes them something. People often say that, but I mean it here: these men think that there is a debt that someone, somewhere, needs to make good.
It comes from, I think, being jealous and afraid from their school days, hearing the boys who played rugby count up the scalps of the willing girls. (This is not, of course, the only reason, it is just the most obvious one in a place and time where you must measure your success by how much other people want to be in your orbit.)
They saw these boys and thought to themselves, I’m not popular now, but just wait. Just wait. Someday they’ll come running to us, and the geeks on the chess team, the library monitors, the lighting crew, all of us spindly okes will run the world. The angry boys who would be angry men wrote burning poetry about the planets that they never showed anyone else. They spoke scornfully amongst themselves (though they did not mention the galactic poetry) and said things like, ‘He’s peaking. Give him five years. He’ll be a used-car salesman.’
But it didn’t happen. Their twenties were taken up with the same pattern of study and struggle and rejection; the rugger-buggers still ruled - they married early; they were middle managers; other people, confusingly, still wanted to be near them.
And also the angry men ignored the girls who would go out with them. Ordinary girls. Nice ones, who sat hopefully on the bench beside them.
The epiphany came early in their thirties. One morning they looked at themselves in the mirror and saw their fathers, their grey hairs, their stubbly indignant cheeks. And they understood that they had never known when they peaked. They were too busy being keeping score of the things they thought they didn’t have. Tallying, after all, ties up the hands.
And - ooh-wee - the angry men want their revenge. Partly it is a revenge on themselves for being foolishly self-involved, a punishment for not being bold, not kissing the girl who sat beside them, hopefully, on the bench. They are determined to make up for their craven adolescence and their foot-licking twenties. They do have jobs, the angry men - jobs and cars and parents who are puzzled at their single state. They have worked out every aspect of their lives except the one that cannot be controlled. But they try.
They choose the women who are only sitting on the benches because they are tired and there is nowhere else to sit. The angry men start with conversation, and then they make pathetic drunken propositions; they make terrifying aggressive overtures. They go home alone and when they are hungover in the morning they look at their bald heads in the mirror and say to themselves, Bitch. And they also say to themselves, At least I tried.
The trouble is, sooner or later I’m going to let an angry man lay his bald head down in my lap; stroke its smoothness, and think that I love him and that this is not capitulation or loss. He will stay angry, even with my love; at it, even, furious at me for not being something he wants but cannot name, deserving something better, something more.
I was almost there, this winter. I was tired of the south-easter and the devils in the doorways, sick of my own smell.
But then you called about the jasmine.
I’m not ready to give in yet. Not this Spring.

In Kalk Bay, the millionaires’ flats they made from the ruins of the old Majestic are up for sale. The billboard plagiarises a Jack Vettriano painting, that one where the couple is dancing on the beach in full evening gear.
Except for shoes. The woman is not wearing her heels.
The slogan is, variously, Elegance, Grace and Charm, and then, It’s time to take your place in history.
Which is weird, and sad. The people already trickling into Kalk Bay are people utterly devoid of elegance, grace or charm. They are never going to be dancing on the sand at the beach. What they’re going to be doing is slamming their hands on the faux leather interiors of their four-by-fours, swearing that There’s no fucking parking in this godforsaken village! The ones who are going to bring their sadness and their children with them, and then sit in the cafes ignoring each other. It’s kind of funny. I saw some the other day, ladies on a daytrip at the Olympia. They were snapping their fingers at the waitresses and complaining loudly about the service.
It makes you wonder why they’ve come here, from Gauteng and the Free State, and even just a few miles yonder, from Cape Town and what used to be its outlying suburbs - you know, people who should know better.
It makes you wonder why they want to retire at forty when they haven’t done anything useful with their lives. It has to do, I think, with that old saying about being careful what you wish for.
What is it that they’re looking for? Homeless alcoholics? Toothless fishermen?
I can understand how it originally happened. There was a real upsurge in hypochondria in Victorian England - and a corresponding response: convalescence tourism. People who didn’t have to earn their keep came out here a hundred and fifty, two hundred years ago, to walk along the pier, bask in the sun, and sweat into their corsets. It was imperative to have a blanket around the knees at all times. They turned Kalk Bay into South Africa’s first town of leisure.
It must not have worked. The graveyard of Holy Trinity is filled with them.
And I also get the immigrant fathers, the Jews and Greeks and Germans of a generation ago - people who had something to run away from, but no idea what they were running to. But these strict fathers did something right. Their children have donated wooden benches to the sea on their deaths. They are stationed like soldiers at the lookout points their parents loved.
Last week there was a series of storms so rough that they broke my favourite bench. It was an oldie, I’ll give you that, but it was sturdy, and I had high hopes for it. It had squat cement feet, and then strong wood, bound with iron sinews. On it was engraved, in the hand reserved for invitations and gravestones (which are really the same thing), In Memory of Abe Jacobson, Who Loved Muizenberg.
Every time I marched past on my way to the Empire, I touched that bench and said, ‘Hello, Abe,’ and, ‘How are you this fine morning, sir?’ to let him know that his children and I had not forgotten him.
Because that is what real death is, isn’t it? When there is no one left on Earth who remembers you.
The day after the storms, I went walking. During the two or three preceding nights, the sea had roared and sulked like a Matthew Arnold poem. It had thrown shells into the branches of trees. I found some more shells scattered on the main road, where the waters had also reached, invisibly, and retreated. The sea had obviously changed its mind about destroying us at the very last moment.
I also found Abe Jacobson’s bench, loyal to its usual place. It was smashed into tiny pieces.
There was a single fine plank left, and I said to myself, ‘Awerbuck, that’s a beautiful piece of wood. A smart girl would take it home with her and find a damn good use for it.’
But then I felt bad about stealing from the dead.
There were some locals with fewer qualms. The next day the path had been cleared of every exploded matchstick splinter. Only Abe Jacobson’s concrete feet, like Ozymandias, remained.
But he’s still in my head, see.
I would be lying if I said I was not afraid. The trickle of selfish people has started, and soon it will widen into a flood. We will be swamped, Danger Beach and Abe Jacobson and me. It’s too much to hope that one night soon all the places like the Majestic will be levelled. It’s not that I want death and destruction - and especially not on my doorstep - but still. I’d like, at the very least, for the sea to roll up in waves and smash down that fatuous signage.
If there is any justice in the world, the wicked witch who put charm and grace on a billboard will be squashed beneath it as it falls to Earth.

I went because I was curious. I wanted to see what a few white people with liberal bosses looked like marching in Cape Town’s city centre, there where they never went because they didn’t have to, because they owned cars, because they were afraid.
I wanted to see us weighing up the worth of the old currency, biting down on the coins of democracy. And something in me wanted to see us fail, to see no one turn up, to see race-based politics running the town, to blame the dark and African heart at the centre of it all. I wanted to believe in how easy it is to tip something into the realm of the ridiculous.
But we didn’t fail. What I saw was the middle class stand up for itself. Who knew it had feet? ‘Silence the Violence’ was organised by Cape Talk and orchestrated by Solly Philander, who I think was planning to say a lot more than he did. He stopped because he was crying.
‘You know what to think,’ said Philander. ‘You know who you’ve lost. Walk now.’ And he sent us out with police trucks and peace officers in clothing that crackled in our silence.
What stopped me even before we started was the realisation that each person marching there had suffered for their dead, and that I could not count our number.
The demonstrators heard the noon gun, and their placards went up in a single motion, unrehearsed as sunflowers. It was a strange thing, to be in the middle of that crowd: it was a field of cardboard, a dull forest that rushed me right back to high school musicals, where we hid backstage and waited for our entrances, rustling.
And behind me, when I turned to look, of course, there were the grim and pleasant faces of Cape Town, the faces of people who have made lives for themselves and cannot understand why things have not worked out the way they were told. The clouds parted then, and the sea mist roiled back over the mountain: the midday sun shone on the mad dogs and the Englishmen. It shone through the increased hairs on the sides of their ageing heads; it haloed them and the pictures they held up, all silent.
The people in the pictures looked unsurprised to see themselves enlarged in two dimensions - those terrible innocent photographs, the sunburned monkey-grins of the young and the newly-dead! The still babies in their mortuary clothes, their faces grey and their lips glued together, and all their seams showing. Those mothers weren’t crying. They had done their mourning. You couldn’t tell the sadness from the outside at all.
The streets had been cleared and all the hawkers and layabouts stood gape-mouthed like peasants in a Chaucer tale. They roamed like tourists, trapping themselves in the elephant skyways above Adderley Street, pressed against the smoked glass, staring. We dampened their noise so that their arms fell to their sides, and their wire transistor radios plinked in time with the parade.
Because we weren’t dead: we were a procession, a walking fête, with women like circus tents, tiny nuns, a shrunken old couple with their arms entwined, like an ad for a bank.
The woman just ahead of me was still holding up a photograph in a black velvet frame, her fingers digging into the fur at its back. She held it up for an hour and a half, unflagging, that woman.
We will survive. We are stronger than you think. It turns out well in the end, in white doves that diverged like planes in an air show. Because they did; they really did. The birds were released from the hands of the trembling Philander.
It was a holy thing, that walk, a kind of El Camino, culminating in the popping up of three wise men on the town hall balcony on the Grand Parade: a rabbi, an imam, an arch-bishop in a bright purple cassock. They stood there and intoned the open secret of democracy into African microphones, of living and letting live, of the will of thousands of people, sent up like doves into the afternoon air.