The Lion Seeker (18 page)

—What you talking exactly?

—What I been saying!
The motor game
. I'm coming to Joburg to start up in the motor game. Got one helluva good idea. I'm sitting here tryna bladey get this through to you.

—It's funny.

—What?

—I've just been thinking of maybe going for a job, mechanic like. Apprentice.

There's a silence. —Now why the hell would you go and do that? Aren't you listening what I'm just talking?

— . . . I dunno, says Isaac.

—Man, I've seen you at work. You fixed us up with a stocking for Christ sake. A stocking! You can probably teach
them
.

—Who's them?

—Wherever you thinking of going for this idyat apprentice idea, Tiger. You don't need it man. Listen, what you
need
is to get out a that chuzzesuh shoe shop you in.

—Ja?

—Absolutely! I'm coming to Joeys soon and I want you available and ready for service, man. We are ganna be milking the cream, boyki. Milking the absolute cream. I guarantee. So you go on and you quit that kuk job. Don't you worry. Old Blezzy's your backstop now. Don't you hassle it one second.

 

After the call Isaac smokes three cigarettes in a row, walking up and down in the alley. You might as well do it. Just get it over with. He goes to Mr. Pivnik's office with a knocking heart and resigns from the shoe shop. Pivnik doesn't seem surprised. Isaac gets a couple weeks' pay in his pocket and goes home and doesn't say anything when Mame starts the usual jolly interrogation. But he has to force the food down, the way this fresh betrayal of his mother makes him want to be sick. His father gives him an odd look over his gefilte fish dotted with purple chrayn.

After supper, Rively goes out to meet Yankel Bernstein and Isaac puts on his one suit, the stiff black three-piece with the black tie that was the only asset he ever did see out of Miracle Glow, and he polishes his shoes nicely before stepping out. How you look to the world, how you
shine
, is all that matters, according to old Bleznik. No, but Isaac inside himself knows that he'll never be a Hugo. A backslapper. A shmoozer. A salesman. He is a different kind. He'll never kiss an arse; he'll rather rip the balls out from under it and kick it out the way. The tough black suit hangs funny on his wiry sinews, his hard narrow bones and pointy shoulders. His mood is sour and harsh. He walks past number forty slowly and sees lights on in the Greyshirt house, the Greyshirt who never has to walk anywhere because he has that beautiful DeSoto Airflow parked in the back.

He goes into Hillbrow, heading for a larney supper club on Claim Street. There's four or five of these posh spots he's been nipping into and out of now and then, stabbing his nose into that rarefied milieu to sniff a waft of what he one time breathed so fully up on the ridge in The Castle's golden airs. This front door is below street level; tobacco clouds and brass sounds come up to meet his descent. A doorman squints then sways aside. Heat press of bodies, the sudden rush of enveloping jazz. One wall is brick, the other painted red. A packed crowd between a three-sided bar at the far end, some tables to its right set in little nooks of half walls that project from the brick. On a little stage to the far left, five musicians play swing, the trumpeter in a fuchsia zoot suit with a long watch chain and a neck that toadishly swells over the collar with every rising note.

With alternating shoulders Isaac digs through the crowd to the bar. He grips an overpriced Scotch and soda, feels himself sweating under the suit, watching the band, the heads of the dancers jitting up and down all the way to the tiny stage. People are pretending to be having fun when it's all just blare and squash and too-expensive watered-down crooking drinks. How much is this bar clearing? Three hundred in here, about. Each one paying a bob for a drink and having at least two, that's just a tanner short of half a crown per head at minimum, that's—

But he stops his calculations because he is seeing something from the side of his eye that it takes a moment for the rest of him to catch up to. He turns slowly and it's with a feeling almost like uncovering some horrific wound that he thinks, Yes it's her, it is, this time it really is.

It's easy to track her through the crowd, her hair not held by a dancer's band but falling in a loose thick splash like a halo about that round face with the pouting mouth. He notices other men watching. He feels for his cigarettes in his pocket but then he doesn't take the pack out. She's being led through in a party. He tracks them as they pass him, swivelling to watch them settle finally in one of the nook tables that's been kept reserved with a little wooden triangle in the middle that the waiter now takes away. The group of them sink slowly, taking their time, all of them smart in their smart clothes and the boys moving the chairs back for the girls. She's wearing a black dress with a half cardigan over the shoulders and when she sits the cardigan comes off and he can see her good firm arms. He remembers the strength under the high voice, the thickness of her neck, but also the warmth.

It takes him almost an hour, drinking steadily, before he finds himself standing at the table, leaning back on the little half wall behind. He is looking down at the back and side of her face. He was curious in himself to see what being next to her would do to him; he didn't believe that he would feel what he felt but he is wrong. Right here and now in the blare of this dim room with its smoke and heat and motion, he feels the white flooding light switch on in his chest. The silent cold purity of it. There is no shying away from this inner reality. It is there and it is true.

So he stands with his lit-up chest and he is ignored for perhaps a quarter of an hour and he cannot speak. The longer he stands the harder it becomes to break his silence, the silence congealing, hardening like a shell. Inside it's just stubborn pain, a wilding; his face is a blood-hot flame. His hand mechanically makes him drink from a drink that's long gone and it's only the dissolving ice cubes that keep tapping on his teeth. He looks past his shoulder for a time, to the stage: at least try to seem to be enjoying the noise, but then why is he standing, just standing?

Then the band breaks and in the quiet like a suction around him he clears his throat and says hello, then coughs and repeats, aiming it louder, right into the centre of their bright chatter. Nothing happens. He leans forward stiffly. —Yvonne.

She turns her head and her face opens, startled.

—Howzit, he says, breathless. How you Yvonne? Remember me hey?

The bright chatter pauses. The fellow beside Yvonne—the one who has glanced up from his seat at Isaac the most, who wears a bow tie and ivory-rim glasses—squints up and says,—Who is this chap, Badge?

Isaac's never seen a boy wearing a bow tie before. A plump one next to him has on some manner of scarf. Another one is smoking from a cigarette holder. The girls all have hats, gloves. Yvonne had on a little black sailor cap with netting; it's on the table now. Dry in the mouth, Isaac swings his gaze over the faces. His breaths pant in him. From a distance they might look grown-up but in close the faces are too smooth, too much puppy fat. Isaac looks at them and sees that they are becoming their parents, jumping ahead already to win the game before it's even started. (A picture of her father Cecil then, in The Castle, so clear: him too with his scarf thing and his ivory cigarette holder.)

—I, he tells them. I'm Isaac.

—Well, salutations. Inebriations.

—Tra la.

—Here's to Isaac, and Abraham and Moses too.

Isaac lifts his empty glass at their full ones. Forces a grin at them, feeling like he's peeling flesh up off his skull.

—Acquaintance of yours, Badge? the plump one is saying to Yvonne.

Bowtie is touching Isaac's jacket, fingering the point of it. —I say. I do say. Where
did
you get this?

—Chappie's enormously friendly, a dark-haired girl says. For a waiter. Enormously friendly.

—But Wayne said he
knows
Yvonne.

—I did not, says Wayne. Certainly did not.

—Waiter chappie knows Badge.

—Who
is
he, Badge?

He tries to croak her name again but she's not looking at him and in any case nothing oozes from his bone-dry throat.

—Are you sure? Bowtie says, squinting up. Are you certain that you're not an undertaker, hah?

The black-haired girl shrieks, going backwards in her chair. Drinks are poured. Isaac moves from foot to foot. Sweat caterpillaring both temples. Again he tries to speak: a rasp comes out.

—Oh shame, oh shame, says another girl. Look at him, shame. Don't all be so beastly. You're all starting to be beastly again, like that other time.

—Does he want a drink?

—He's a hovering kind of chappie isn't he?

—Look how he looks.

—Uriah Heep, says Wayne loudly.

The longest round of sputtering laughter yet.

—Uriah Heep, oh God. Perfect.

—The hair. The nose.

—The everything.

—Not the
height
.

Only Yvonne hasn't laughed, stirring her drink, with her cheek on her palm.

—Oh he's blocking the light, says Wayne, louder than all. Go way, already.
Go
. This Wayne is flapping his hand, the back of his hand, towards Isaac now, not even looking around. Isaac takes out a yellow box of Lion matches. He shifts over to lean down close behind him.

Wayne making a show of yawning now. Wayne holding up an empty glass without looking around, as if Isaac should take it away like a waiter. —Badge, he says, singsonging. So bo-ring. So tee-dee-us.

Isaac says into Wayne's ear: —Something important.

—Everyone quiet, Wayne tells the table. Uriah has news.

—You see, says Isaac.

—Yes?

—It's your head. It's on fire.

He straightens up. A second later Wayne jerks forward, his hands shooting to his hair, glasses spilling. Then he rises volcanically: dishes breaking, table kicking, bottles dropping. The girls scream and the boys are saying what and the band starts up again. Now hands are beating at the smoking head. Someone pours something over it.

In all this Isaac has gone straight for her, clamped her shoulder. —Yvonne. So close into her ear: —You. You did this.

Chairs are falling over backwards, faces are being deformed in the same way: an open-mouthed vertical stretching, disbelief and outrage mingled. Their cries are so loud that even over the music people are turning back to watch, those at the next table have stood up. The last Isaac sees of her is a hurt going right deep through the backs of her green eyes, then he's crashing through the crowd, tromping on shoes, using his elbows. As he gets to the bottom of the stairs someone punches him in the back of the head. He keeps going. At the top the heavy doorman is coming down. —He's by the bar, Isaac tells him. Someone crazymad's got a knife.

The doorman shoves him aside, rushes down. Isaac runs then walks for an hour through town, waiting for his thoughts to settle while a knot lifts on the back of his skull. He only sees now why they said undertaker and Italian waiter, it's because of his suit. Hugo got black ones cos he said the Boers wouldn't trust any other kind. He puzzles over some other words, they called him uri or uri heed, something, but he can't make sense of it, just another one of their incomprehensible posh little jabs. Eff them. His ribs are still damp with sweat.

MONDAY MORNING ISAAC GOES ACROSS TOWN
, to the address on the card his father gave him. It's on the far side of City and Suburban, a district like so many in Joburg named after one of the mines that dot the whole sweep of the land on which this tangled city rests, the mines like giant pins sunk down to pierce the reefs locked in the rock below, thin strata dappled with the soft yellow metal that men had always killed and died for and probably always would. Isaac finds the section of Marshall Street he seeks to have flat-topped buildings behind chainlink fences. Cars in lots, garages. He stops outside a white cinderblock unit. Gold Reef Panel Beating Pty. Ltd.

He walks up and down outside for fifteen minutes, thinking of Hugo and his new idea, Hugo warning him not to take any garage job. The sky is overcast, the breeze is warm. He tugs on his lip, he doesn't have to take the job even if it's offered, right. Right? He can just have a look, nothing more. Another five minutes pass. Then he swears aloud and goes in.

There's a room with steel mesh walls with labelled keys hung up, and bathing costume girls with tzitzkes the size of ripe watermelons are advertising Vico Motor Oil and London Aluminium (experts in ferrous and non-ferrous metals and ANODISING). The noise from the shop visible beyond is a clang clang clanging and men shouting and the shrieking sparking whine of angle grinders cutting steel and the shrill gupping rip of hydraulic screw guns sucking out bolts (he knows these tools from his time as a kid in other garages in Braamfontein). But a bright clanging is strange and new, loudest and continuous: like a waterfall of knives and forks coming down over sharp rocks all the time.

Isaac goes to the open doorway for a better look at the shop, stands with nostrils prickling at the industrial odours of lead vapour, burnt steel, sweetish faintly garlic-like acetylene, fresh paint and petrol, sweat and rubber. He sees one of the cars is up on the steel trunk of a hydraulic lifter. A closer one is on the ground and a man in overalls cocks his head and feels its dented body with one hand then taps with a tool Isaac has never seen, a kind of wedge like a steel lollipop on the end of a long handle. While Isaac stares, a man approaches from the side. —Help you?

—Ja, sorry. I'm Isaac.

—Hey?

—Isaac Helger. Ginzburg said I should come here.

—How's zat?

—Ginzburg. About a job.

The man's chin goes up, bobs. —Oh ja, Ginzy. Ja, oright. Just wait over there the office.