Tales of the Metric System. Imraan Coovadia

will see you then. Enjoy your play.

      Victor waited until the caretaker had gone into the passage and then closed the door. He was shivering. It would be this evening or never that he had the reference book back in his hands. When there was unrest the laws were enforced more strictly. If it was found that the endorsement in your pass book had expired, you would be put in a lorry to the native reserves.

      Victor wanted to travel in a Mercedes and in an aeroplane, attend the double feature at the European drive-in, buy more meat from the Clover butchery than a man could consume in a sitting, walk the streets without fear of interception, and kiss the reluctant women in town. To do any of it he needed to recover his permit from Mr Shabangu before it was gone forever.

      He wouldn’t be able to do anything during the play. The caretaker would most likely stay in his room during the performance, as agitated as if he had to prevent demons entering from downstairs. It was a unique occasion. Since Victor had arrived at the hostel, Polk was the first person to give Mr Shabangu pause under the roof of his kingdom.

      The world changed with the units of measurement. There were no more inches and yards, no more distances in miles on the road signs, no more pound notes fetched from the drawers of the cash register, no more pints and gallons as defined by the Imperial System. Instead, there were metric units, which simplified division and multiplication and therefore exposed any confusions in existing arrangements.

      At the Shell garage they had converted a row of pumps to sell petrol per rand per litre. When the oil supply was interrupted in the Middle East, a queue of Chevrolets, Cortinas, and Hillman Avengers stood bumper to bumper. Next door was Galaxy Tea Room where the men bought provisions, and which had started to stock white sugar in fly-bothered half-kilogram packets, along with milk in half-litre glass bottles, while, behind the counter, the proprietor, Tarun Naicker, announced that now he was doing things by halves.

      You weren’t familiar with litres, not to say centimetres, kilograms, and electricity sold in bundles of kilowatt hours. The terms had the ring of the space age, the vocabulary of astronauts and cosmonauts. You had heard about the success of George Foreman, studied the indistinct portrait of the world heavyweight champion in the same newspaper where you read that the Vietnam war had ended. Two beauty queens travelled to London on the same Jumbo jet to compete for Miss World, a Miss South Africa who was fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and long-legged, plus a Miss Africa South who was a long-legged coloured. Skylab 2 was launched to survey a planet where the star of a hundred kung-fu movies, Bruce Lee, found sudden death. On September 11th, General Pinochet levelled the Presidential Palace in Santiago.

      And it was opening night at the Caledonian Christian Men’s Hostel. It was the only drama the building had seen apart from the Nativity plays put on by visiting evangelists. Polk was calmer than ever. He sat behind the wheel of his Datsun, instructing the workers through the open window as they brought in cartons from the back of the van. He was not far into his forties yet he seemed as heavy as an old man when you considered him sunk into his seat.

      —Have you seen Roland? He was meant to be here by now.

      —I haven’t seen him, Mr Polk. Must I go and look for him?

      —You can go and look, but I don’t think you’ll find anything, my boy. On opening day Roland is bound to act up. You go inside. I don’t want to have your Mr Sobukwe giving me the evil eye.

      —Mr Shabangu.

      —Mr Shabangu who has this place in his toils. I don’t envy you being under his thumb.

      Victor didn’t mind flying back in search of Roland. The actors would be gone by the weekend. He wanted to memorise each unlikely minute of their appearance, to drink in the picture of Janet in her satin blouse with raised red roses on the pocket. She was already standing on the stage, repeating her lines from a card, red hair pinned tightly to her bone-white scalp. He could have spied on her all day from his vantage point in the passage. She had the strange immeasurable beauty of a witch. He wouldn’t be able to get her out of his eyes.

      At the same time Victor didn’t want to be caught in the act of looking. Only some people had the right to look at others. Even with Polk and his stars, who were unlike any other Europeans he had encountered, Victor had the instinct to flinch when they tried to talk to him directly.

      He went back out and put his head through the window of the van.

      —Roland never arrived. Janet is there.

      —Get in on the other side. We can go and find a Castle Lager.

      Victor got in and sat on the other side of the van, which had no seatbelts, and a rusting panel where the radio had been. Polk was wearing his standard uniform consisting of a short-sleeved safari shirt, belted light-brown pants and brown dress shoes. He looked like a farmer. He showed a certain pleasure in the bulk of his body. You could see it in the way he steered the bakkie.

      —You don’t want to check on Roland first?

      —When we come back from the bottle store, then we will see if he is here or not. If he still hasn’t arrived we will go after him. Then he’s had his chips.

      Polk talked like a farmer, turning the sentences around in his mouth, descending to an accent so gravelly and so sincere that it was no longer believable. You could only speak like that if you lived in the heart of the country, never listened to an lp or to a radio drama, if you still counted your produce in terms of pounds and gallons and fluid ounces rather than litres and kilograms. But Polk wasn’t a farmer. He had been around the world and he had already begun to undermine the system of Mr Shabangu.

      On the main road there were Bedford trucks on their way to the vast harbour under construction at Richards Bay. The canvas rose under the ropes at the rear to reveal stacks of pine planks and canisters of diesel gas. In between them were smaller vans used by employers to transport their workers to building sites, shoeless men in shorts sitting on the back of the vehicle holding hoes and rakes.

      Polk parked outside the bottle store and waited for Victor to bring his order. Then they sat on the side of the main road and drank beer from an ice-filled packet. It wasn’t the first time they had done it. Each evening, once rehearsal was done, Polk emptied a string of Castles, one after the other. He drank in the front seat of his Datsun until his face was red in the atmosphere of the car light. When one bottle was finished he staggered out of the car and opened the trunk to find the next. He had told Victor about the nineteen months he spent on a merchant ship after failing out of university, sailing across the Persian Gulf with cargoes of soy beans and car parts, and about his first play performed in a one-room schoolhouse in King William’s Town, and about the open spaces of the country which subdued and exalted the heart.

      Victor liked to listen to Polk. He would have listened to him, and drunk with him, for another few hours today. But he didn’t want the director to tire himself out so early on the day of the opening performance. He suspected Polk would fall asleep if he consumed another bottle, his thick legs wedged unnaturally on the safety brake.

      When Polk opened the door to piss in the parking lot and looked fondly at the bottle-store window, it was time to remind him to go back to the hostel and see about Roland. Polk could hardly understand the question. He looked bewildered. Victor couldn’t think where, in such a sodden man, the power of imagination was located.

      Polk soon recovered, however. He sent Victor to get a very hot cup of coffee with Cremora from the adjoining tea room. He drank it without being scalded, and drove back carefully on the other side of the street, leaning towards the windscreen to get a closer look at the road. Every morning, after all, it was as if the previous evening and the previous bottle never happened. Already Polk couldn’t remember being angry at Roland. The guy would have a second portion of chips.

      At noon, however, Roland hadn’t arrived and couldn’t be raised on the hotel telephone. Polk concentrated on Janet and made some adjustments to her movements around the other actors. He drew a map for her in red ink, where she would stand and where she would be looking during each major speech, and made her memorise her itinerary around the stage before he tore it up. He showed no further ill effect from the alcohol. During rehearsal, as he sent Victor along