“Sudgint Skosaan!” And he feels himself violently pummelled.
He buries his head in the pillows. This woman has a voice worse than a blerry
hadeda. And why is his wife addressing him as “Sergeant”?
Because the
station is calling, there’s some woman her husband has been slag’d, he has to go down there.
“Jussis, it’s still early, I just had a
fourteen-hour day, fufuksake.”
“There’s no
one else. Only my man, he’s the heee-ro.” But she is mocking him, and
not for the first time he regrets knocking her up at eighteen and doing the
honourable thing. And getting twins for his pains. Girl twins, nog al. He kicks himself into his
uniform, straps on his weapon. Thirsty.
In the
dusky yellow kitchen Shereen is standing dangling an empty plastic water bottle
from her little finger. The twins are at her knees, squalling.
“So go and
get some from Suleiman. If he has any left. It hasn’t rained for four days, he
might have run out.”
“And who
never got us rainwater tanks, huh?”
“How was I
supposed to know Melville Dam would kiss out?
Bacon and eggs for brekkers?”
“You wish.
There was no meat this whole week, now you want? Where’s all your famous con-tacts, ay? You the po-lice, you
should be able to get us some. And you going to get water, or what?”
“Move your
own lazy pins,” he snaps. “Or send the twins. You just told me I gotta get to
the station.”
“They’re
only two, you bozo.”
“Twins are
always two, you moron. I gotta go, as they say in the movies.”
All this is
not without affection, but Cornal Skosaan is grateful that, almost alone
amongst townspeople, his police vehicle has some petrol, and he can drive away.
The streets are mos’ empty, but at the
Beaufort Street police station, despite the early hour, there is a queue of
clamouring complainants. Like a blerry herd
of hadedas. There’s an hour to go before the captain gives his morning
briefing; they’d got slack about this, but since the storms they’ve all had to
be more on their toes, so much shit going down. He gets the daily sitrep from
Xoliswa the desk corporal, reading over the grumble of the back-up generators –
no Eskom for, what, three weeks now.
Skosaan,
still feeling gummy, tries to fix the cases in his head.
1. The Traffics
are mostly out on the King highway pile-up, two big trucks and a tanker spill,
causing a blockage for three days now, mudslides meant recovery vehicles couldn’t
access.
2. Someone
complained about assault in the queue out to the water-spring on the Port
Alfred road; that queue stretched two kays all the way back into town; some
were lining up dozens of barrels and selling water for profit and citizens
getting antsy about that.
3. Spikes
in house break-ins and domestic violence cases; those that had left – about two-thirds
of the population, estimated – were having their houses raided for food or
whatever, or squatted in; those that were left, were getting more stressed and
taking it out on their nearest and dearest. Tell me about it, Skosaan thought
ruefully. Situation normal, only more
so.
4.
Complaint about taxi drivers shooting at each other, competing to get people
out, or at least to the nearest flooded river, where people then swam or waded
across to taxis on the other side. Two hundred bucks a pop. Latest shooting at
De Wet Steyn bridge, no bridge there now; no casualties, fortunately, but two
kids swept away and presumed dead.
5. Report of
two gang attacks on trucks headed for the supermarkets, out on the Bedford road;
so several police vehicles and an Army escort had gone to see what was cutting;
not clear yet if they could get across the Fish River at Carlyle Bridge, though
waters were just beginning to recede now.
6. Report
that vandals had stripped away several kilometres of electricity cable along
the PE road. That’ll make life easier for everyone, Skosaan reflected bitterly –
except for one or three skellums working the black market. Situation normal,
only more so.
And there
was more; his mind went numb. His stomach growled.
“We’re all
spinning like tops,” said Xoliswa.
“When are
the East Lunnun cops getting here to help out?”
“Who knows?
Stuck the other side of the Fish, probably.”
“And all
these people outside?”
She
shrugged, again. “Who knows? I’ll get to them. This guy” – she points with her
pen at a young man standing at the desk – “can you believe it, he wants his
birth certificate notarised. In the
middle of all this kak.”
“I need it
to leave town,” the man responds testily in isiXhosa.
“You’re
leaving? How?”
“I don’t care
how, I am going. First my shack is full of sand from the dust storm; then the
cyclone came and washed it away, whum! Just like that. I lose half my
documents, my clothes, everything. Now I can’t find even any food. You want me
to pay twenty rand for just one potato? No way! For one week everybody helped
everybody, it was hard times but someone would help you: some water here, some
pineapples there. But now, just two more weeks and everybody is like hyenas,
they just want to eat you, eat your money.”
Not everyone, Skosaan hoped, or knew; but he
nodded; it was getting much harder, as the town had basically shut down, food
and fuel supplies down to the tiniest trickle. At least, after the months of
drought, the rain had brought water. Just not through the taps.
He asked
Xoliswa, “So where’s this murder case I’m supposed to see about?”
“She’s back
here in your office. I can’t make sense of her, she is from Senegal or Pakistan
or somewhere. Shouting and crying.”
Skosaan sighed
and walked through to his office. If violence was going to erupt, surely it
would klap the foreigners first. Repeat of the 2015 xenophobic outbreaks,
blerry terrifying.
The woman
was nearly catatonic with grief, choking, sobbing in broken English, with some
of what sounded to him like French maybe. She ripped her doek from her head and
thrashed it against the desk; she had fashioned her hair into corn-rows, just
as Shereen had done; in fact, the two women looked rather similar, except this
one was a lot darker. He wondered briefly how Shereen would behave if he was bumped off. Or, alternatively,
the other way round. And felt a heart-spasm of panic.
Jissus,
he wasn’t trained to manage this stuff. He yelled through to Xoliswa, “Where’s
D.I. Nyezwa, she should be handling this.”
“Down at
Bathurst with the taxi thing,” she yelled back.
Shit.
Skosaan turned back to the woman. He got her a bottle of water, and one for
himself, from their admin stock; at least they had that still. After a while he
calmed her down enough to ascertain that she was indeed from Senegal; her
husband was Zimbabwean, running a little spaza up in Extension 6. What with all
the tall security lights out since the cyclone and the blackout, the usual
criminal activity up there had just intensified. The Zim oke, though there must
have been precious little left to guard, was sleeping in the spaza overnight; a
bunch of men – it must have been a bunch – smashed in and cut him to pieces.
“He just
lying dere,” the woman screams. “No police, no ambulance, no nothing!” And she collapsed sobbing on the floor.
Skosaan sighed again: no surprise there was no ambulance, there was probably
only one left operating for the whole town. And where would they take the body?
The private morgues had no power to freeze the bodies, only the hospital itself
did, and that was overfull – the old and the newborns dying off more quickly,
what with lack of shelter and food and clean water, sewage rising out the
clogged storm drains. Burials happening daily, with little ceremony, as bad as
during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Situation normal, only more so.
He called
out to Xoliswa, “Who’ve we got who can go up and verify this deceased?”
“You,” she
shouted back. She sounded like she
thought it was funny.
“I must
just get some forms, then we go up there,”
he told the woman. He would get her name and stuff properly later. He
couldn’t understand why no one was with her, a friend at least. The captain had
arrived at his office across the gloomy corridor. “Sir. You wanna help me with
a” – he almost said stiff – “murder
victim?” The captain gave him a bleak, exhausted stare and closed his door.
The drive
up to Extension 6 had become weird, like something out of a ‘pocalypse movie;
you expected, Skosaan amused himself, zombies to come lurching out from between
shattered buildings, blea-aa-arghhh!
The few people visible in fact moved around like zombies, as if these three
weeks had sucked all the stuffing and meaning out of their lives. Except the
criminals, of course – they always seemed to have the most energy.
They had to
drive slowly through the muddy flow of water still filling the dip in Raglan
Road; and the upper end, curving up towards the flats, was still awash with mud
and rocks, all but flooded away in parts; the woman let out a sob every time
the police Hilux lurched over a carved-out channel or pothole. The shacklands
that had once clung to the slopes on both sides of the road had gone, wiped
away by dust, then the gale-force winds of the cyclone, then the flooding rain.
Some remnants, buckled corrugate and wire, still lay on the road itself, to be
manoeuvred round. Garbage heaped up in giant piles. Only the trees clustered
atop Makana’s Kop seemed immoveable.
As they
finally drove onto the flat lands alongside the township, where only the stumps
of the roadside gum trees remained, all cut down for firewood, Skosaan spotted
a lanky white man in a heavy green jacket, a rifle slung across his back,
striding along the roadside. He slowed down beside him.
“Where to,
sir, with that gun?”
The man
gave half a grin, a shrug. “Thought I’d go out to the bush, see if I could hunt
anything.”
“You
are...?”
“Jesse van
der Vleis.”
“Don’t
shoot anyone, Mr van der Vlies, I would have to arrest you!”
“Vleis, not
Vlies,” the man called after him as Skosaan accelerated again.
They turned
left towards Extension 6, past the abandoned schools, the locked library, the
loiterers with their closed suspicious faces. Eerily, not a single animal: not
a cow, not a donkey, not even a dog. All chowed, or starved to death, Skosaan
guessed. A cluster of people at one corner where some women had set up a soup
kitchen; there were always those who would muck in like that, make a plan, do
unexpected acts of kindness. The community would adjust, and survive. In some
form. But meanwhile...
“Where
exactly?” The woman wordlessly pointed out the directions with her water-bottle,
until they came to the pokey spaza, or what was left of it: the door torn from
its hinges, the security screens, such as they were, ripped aside. Its empty
black interior. Two young men in attendance, who waved glumly at the woman.
Sergeant Cornal Skosaan could
almost already smell the stench of death. He leaned his forehead briefly on the
steering-wheel.
“Okay,” he
muttered. “Let’s do this.”
As they said in the movies.
*****
(Again, this is fiction: no
actual person is intentionally represented here.)
I enjoyed reading your two Makhanda stories. They're grim but not unrelievedly pessimistic. Cautionary tales that the leaders and citizens of our country would do well to read. Your humanity shines through them. The sad thing is that much of our current and future suffering is self-inflicted and avoidable. Instead of preparing for environmental catastrophe and building communities, most of our leaders are plundering the public purse for personal profit.
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