Glittering Gallows

Chapter 4

35 C Chapter 4 he morning sun had long risen from the peaks of the Magaliesberg when Regis Makgunda awoke partially imprisoned in webs, deathly spiders seemingly hanging guard over him. Ants roamed his limbs and belly. The stings he felt around the waistline of his trousers, in his groan and pubic hair, were testimony lice were prematurely breakfasting on him before he had taken anything. The centre of his life, a homemade cart made from angle-iron, water pipes and two car wheels, stood on its axel by his side. He had removed the wheels the previous night to discourage thieves from stealing his cart. The wheels were worn out and in separate locations in the park’s thick foliage of flowers. Checking his bearings, he found he was on tawny lawn on the centre of a large rockery of shrubs and hibiscus in the middle of Burgers Park at the corner of Visagie and Van Der Walt St. Across Jacob Maré St to the south was the historic Victorian Melrose House, white-walled and red-roofed, in which the Treaty of Vereeniging, ending the Anglo-Boer War, was signed in 1902. Since the park started its life as a state-sponsored botanic garden in honour of Thomas François Burgers, the President of South Africa from 1872 to 1877, before it was converted into a recreational park, the amenity was vast, enchanting and full of colour and fascinations. Regis was in a secluded spot in the park, a spot he had tarnished with the fires he lit at night to keep the cold and snakes at bay. Despite its beauty, there were many snakes in the park garden though incidents of snake bites were rare. The fire damaged the lawn and wilted the flowers close to his open-air bedroom, which made him and other vagrants unpopular with the municipal janitors who minded the park. He was lying on loathsome grubs, slugs, centipedes and squashed millipedes. A fire from mainly cardboard boxes and newspapers he T 36 had constantly stoked throughout the night, was now a sooty smouldering spot outside his prison. Except for the ants and the spiders, most of the insects scuttled away when he opened his eyes and stirred, yawning recklessly. The smell from his armpits offended him. His teeth were so green, yellow and blue-black that he detested them. But they were better than his colleagues’ teeth because at times he remembered to wash them with ash and water using his finger as a toothbrush. His hair was so unkempt and dirty that he couldn’t be mistaken for a Rastafarian. His clothes were stained, soiled and worn out. The public safely categorised him as a lunatic. He believed an echidna led a better life than he did. Experience told him vagrancy was perpetual hell. His poverty abject and phenomenal, he had every reason to believe he came into the world by mistake and was therefore unknown in Heaven. How could an educated man like him be so hapless in a resourceful country endowed with gold and diamonds? If his two-year-old dejection and vagrancy continued unabated for a few more months, he feared an inexplicable psychosis that had crept in him would worsen to noticeable levels. In the two years he had lived in Pretoria’s verandas and recreational parks, he noticed that a majority of the city’s destitute people eventually went insane. They drifted into a world of soliloquy, wanton swearing and cursing, and scavenged for scraps of food in refuse bins. He sat up from his makeshift pillow, a tattered duffle bag holding the residue of his life, and looked at the vistas of the city’s buildings. Inside the buildings thousands of people enjoyed a life that could’ve been his as well had fate been less cruel with him. The skyscrapers, marvellous slices of European edifices, housed architects, engineers, salespersons, accountants, brokers, technicians, estate agents and other professionals. With his Paramedics and Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) diplomas he would’ve easily fitted in some office, ambulance or workshop in Pretoria, or any other city, just like many people, but it appeared he was cursed. The blight not only derailed him from reaching his envisaged pinnacle of his life, which was running his 37 own fleet of ambulances or operating an NDT laboratory, but went on to shrink and thwart his world. Suspecting he wasn...