Welcome to Our Hillbrow: A Novel of Postapartheid South Africa

The Journey through Alexandra

Hillbrow: The Map 63 The Journey through Alexandra Y ou cannot exactly say, Refents̆e, that you were happy when Lerato swallowed those tablets. See the World through the Eyes of a Child . . . was there, providing musical background to the moment of her reckoning. As you watched her make her final decision from your heavenly vantage point, you wished that you could return to Johannesburg and have a chat with her. Impart to her the understanding that it was not entirely her own fault, as people had implied, that you chose to travel that singularly spectacular route of suicide. You wished you could let her know that your problems lay in Tiragalong as much as Hillbrow. You wished that Sammy, too, could have underThe Journey Through Alexandra 63 64 Welcome To Our Hillbrow stood these things – that he was not alone in these acts of betrayal, as the conscience of friendship and love insisted on calling them. Had he understood, Sammy would not have felt the need to support the Comrades of Tiragalong when they accused your mother of being a night prowler. He would simply have said: Yes, she is. And so am I and all of us . . . And had he understood, Sammy might not have drifted into insanity the way he did. You regretted, too, that you were not there to defend Lerato against the cruel telephone call from Terror, when he taunted her with the threat that he was going to tell her mother about the part she had played in your suicide. Terror was a fellow villager who held a long-time grudge against you because you had once disagreed with him when he wanted to incite the pupils of Tiragalong to strike against their teachers. His motive was resentment. He had missed school one Friday and refused to accept his assigned punishment for that. Because your classmates respected you and because you presented an eloquent case in which you demonstrated that Terror’s intentions were for his benefit alone and nobody else’s, you had gained support from your classmates. Which meant that Terror failed to mobilise any for himself. He had never forgotten that insult. So when Terror first met Lerato, at your flat in Van der Merwe Street, he had immediately thought of making advances to her. Everyone from Tiragalong knew that Terror was a womaniser of the worst kind. Long Hillbrow: The Map 65 before your death, he was already making a career for himself as a rapist. He didn’t care who he raped. Any vulnerable woman or girl was fair game to him. There were many such vulnerable people in our Hillbrow, where human cries for help often went unanswered, the multitudes passing by as if oblivious to what was happening, afraid to intervene out of concern for their own lives. Because he was full of spite towards you, Terror wanted to take Lerato’s thighs for a playing field, in which his penis would be player, referee and spectator simultaneously. He wanted to be able to say, later: But what can you tell me now! I have eaten her! She is just as cheap as they all are. Lerato had told you about his advances. Then, one day, when Terror was on one of those missions of his, trying to convince you in his poisonous way that, having become friends through you, Sammy and Lerato were too close for any caring lover to be comfortable, you had ordered him to leave your flat and not to visit again. You had told him who the unreliable friend from Tiragalong really was; he who could not be trusted with a friend’s wife or girlfriend. He whose respect for his manhood was so shallow, that he left it to swim in the pools of AIDS spilling into the night streets of our Hillbrow . Terror had looked at you with eyes that burned with wrath. But he also knew that, although you were gentle, you could fight if you had to defend yourself. So he left you alone, with words to the effect that you would remember him when the right time came. The Journey through Alexandra 66 Welcome To Our Hillbrow That was why, when Sammy told the fragments of his story to Tiragalong, Terror had taken the earliest opportunity to phone Lerato, to scare her with the great revelation that her and Sammy’s murderous behaviour was known...