Tales of the Metric System. Imraan Coovadia

he had nothing to offer. Unless we come up with a donation to the music building he’s planning to put Paul on the bus at mid-term, with all his belongings.

      Neil settled into his chair before he looked back at her.

      —He’s blackmailing us over a bottle of brandy?

      —Two bottles. And the petition Paul started.

      —This country is full of surprises, Ann, but I have never heard of a school blackmailing the parents before.

      —Given what crooks they are behind the scenes, Paul might be better off at dhs. For a government school, it gets good results. Didn’t Sartre want them to shut down every French private school?

      —I’m not defending the existence of these schools, Ann. You and Gert wanted to send him there. It wasn’t my choice. But now Paul is well established. I suppose if we have to pay Lavigne, we can pay him with the money left over from my mother’s estate. I have never had to draw on that capital before.

      It sounded as if Neil, who was without emotion under most circumstances, was growling at her. He was in the grip of some unfamiliar emotion. Ann wasn’t sure that her husband was adapted to real frustrations. He wished for a world in which fair play was the norm and believed, following Sartre’s example, that injustice must be strenuously opposed in each detail. And yet politics, even in this country, was one grey thing opposing another. She couldn’t teach him this, didn’t necessarily want him to submit to this fact, and therefore had the sensation of being far away from Neil. He had said nothing to push her away and yet the prick of it was as real as when her hand found a safety pin in her purse.

      Neil had some news of his own.

      —You won’t believe what I heard today. I worked out why Edward Lavigne’s name sounded familiar. It turns out his older brother Percy is the deputy dean. He may be the acting dean next year.

      —I don’t believe you.

      —I have no idea why nobody said anything to me either. I just never put two and two together. And it’s an unusual last name. They must be quite a pair. I’ve had dealings with this Percy character and he’s every bit as slippery as you describe Edward. Rumour has it that he feeds the Security Branch information on the lecturers. You can’t take rumours for granted, of course, but it sounds as if the younger one might also have a similar understanding with the police.

      —I don’t believe it.

      —Wait a minute and I’ll tell you something else. They say a few years ago Edward was arrested in Pretoria. They dropped the homosexuality charges before the Sunday newspapers could get hold of it. You know how they’ll print anything on the back page if they get the chance. But why did they drop the charges? It’s not impossible that the younger Lavigne is their man in the private-school system.

      —If he insists on expelling Paul, then we have to show him up, Neil. We must go public.

      Neil was solemn.

      —If you go to war with the system Paul will have to leave anyway. The easiest way, assuming we want him to stay, may be to give Lavigne the donation for his music building. How much harm can music do? Do you want to hear something else?

      —I’m not sure that I do.

      —I didn’t either. Some people, who don’t want to be named, suspect Archie is also working with the Special Branch. There’s no real proof, from what I understand, but people have noticed that he has more money in his wallet than they expect him to have, considering the shoes he wears. They have seen him in certain parts of town when there was no reason for him to be there. Now there may be nothing to it at all. Nevertheless, once it gets started, something like that can take on a momentum of its own. But I can make neither head nor tail of it.

       1973 THE PASS

      At five in the morning, the Edendale bus paused at the entrance. The engine was loud. Victor didn’t open his eyes. He put his hand into the inner pocket of his Crombie coat lying beside him, the former property of a sugar millionaire whose name was spelled beneath the collar in blue thread, and felt for the pass book. There was nothing. It was impossible to accept. Victor went back to sleep, to dream about his coming good fortune. He had all the luck, all the friends, a sponsor in the caretaker, another sponsor who was going to be famous around the world.

      In his dream he could almost touch the soft brown face of his father, a beacon of friendship, and see the freckles spaced evenly from his forehead to his chin. The old man had been deft. With a fingernail he had lifted the black-and-white photograph from the pass book, which belonged to a Mozambican miner returning to his country, and replaced it with Victor’s own photograph, taken by the Indian assistant from Crown Portrait Studios. Since then the endorsements at the back, stamped and indecipherably signed and dated in a table of purple ink, had been checked a hundred times by policemen, court administrators, and government clerks. No word had come from his father.

      Either the pass book was in his pocket, where his blind hand couldn’t find it, or it lay somewhere beside the mattress. Victor checked under the coat and around it. Without opening his eyes he searched along the mattress.

      Suddenly he was wide awake. He heard the clopping of a horse on the road, as if it were coming towards him, and stood up. Through the window he saw the tall animal between the arms of a cart, pulling the trussed bundles on the back to the side of the road. Its eyes were rigged with severe black blinkers, joined by a strut over its head. The driver, wearing a corduroy cap, stopped it outside the tea room, where it continued to switch its tail as the man went into the shop.

      Victor saw the horse was no longer young. Its high grey chest, brushed with dark hair at the top and bottom, was muscled like the bodybuilders who tested their weights at the back of the hostel. He kept looking at the horse underneath the awning of the tea room and tried to ignore the discomfort rising in his chest. He didn’t know if he would be as lucky today as in his dreams.

      He tidied up first so he could find it quicker. He folded the blanket under his arm and stored it under the mattress. There was nothing when he turned the bed on its side. Nothing in his shoes apart from the smell of polish. Nothing in his shirt buttoned on the hanger. Nothing to be found in the back pockets of his trousers nor in the overalls that he wore to the print shop. He felt he was trying to answer an impossible riddle.

      The room was the riddle. It was hard to survey the entire area, which, besides being his bedroom, was used as a storage closet. Two mops stood in buckets beside pungent cleaning supplies. Some boxes contained broken light bulbs. They were kept, like eggs in a carton, in case one fine day they should flicker into light. The caretaker of the Caledonian Christian Men’s Hostel, his friend Mr Samuel Shabangu, hated throwing things away. So there was a roll of knotted chicken wire, tins of Dulux with spattered lids, lengths of catgut, and, on a separate blanket, various tools, spanners and screwdrivers and a spirit level, necessary for the kinds of repairs that the caretaker did on a daily basis.

      Only a spell, forbidden to a Christian like Mr Shabangu, could have moved the reference book out of his pocket and across the room. Nevertheless, Victor began to check under the tins. He moved aside the heavy roll of wire to see what it might be hiding. Nothing. He had become a criminal overnight.

      Victor had skirted the law to stay in town. His father had a permit when he worked at Natal Command, the barracks across from Durban North Beach, bringing oats in hot pails for the brown horses in the cavalry yard, and washing down the boots of the riders. As a boy Victor had helped with the work. They settled blankets on the backs of the horses when the regiment returned from exercise, inspected the shod feet of the animals, combed out their manes as the horses knelt in front of the barracks.

      He and his father had slept side by side in a stall of their own. At midnight, he woke to hear the pleased sounds of the horses urinating, the scuffling of hooves against the stall doors, and the soft conversation with which the animals engaged each other, horses and dogs. The rough-tongued German shepherds slept