KOBUS' STORY; THE TREK BEGINS

KOBUS

To anyone hitching around South Africa I would suggest avoiding the towns of Standerton and Volksrust. Both have wide roads leading out of town, beside which there are broad swathes of open ground inviting motorists to pull over. You would think. No such luck. I stood in both towns for hours, waggling my thumb with mute weariness at solitary men in otherwise empty cars. According to the lore of hitching men on their own are more likely to pull over. If they don't then they indicate with embarrassed hand gestures their intention of turning down some side road just beyond you. You know this is bullshit, but at least taking the time to make an excuse. 

In Standerton and Volksrust, instead of looking embarrassed, the beefy faces of the men passing me darkened into distrustful scowls.  I'd left Secunda a bit late, but by the time I neared Ladysmith it was almost five. I'd managed to get a ride with a friendly mechanic in a pick-up truck reeking of oil - a good deal of it coating his overalls. In the middle of nowhere we passed a tall, gaunt figure trudging along with a travel bag slung over each shoulder. The mechanic pulled over and he climbed into the back. A frayed fedora was clamped over long hair and his suit jacket was equally frayed. A huge grey beard waggled in the cold air sweeping over him. Whenever I turned to look back he grinned and gave me the thumbs up. He looked homeless, and I found myself hoping we wouldn't be dropped at the same spot. He was bound to ask me for a few bob, or to hitch alongside me, which would diminish any chance I had of getting a ride.
   My luck was out. The mechanic dropped us both at an intersection on the far side of Ladysmith, just beyond the army camp. The bearded hobo trudged up the road in the direction of Cape Town; I trudged down the road in the direction of Durban. Forty five minutes later we both trudged back to the intersection in the dark. We were surrounded by bush - no streetlights here - and in these conditions, with a car coming along only every twenty minutes or so, there was no chance of a ride. We were stuck together.
   'There's a church up the road here,' he said, pointing back towards the army camp. 'We can spend the night inside the entrance. We'll be hidden, and dry if it rains.'
   I thought: right, but walked back with him anyway. I could make my excuses and get away in due course. We chatted as we walked. He spoke with a strong Afrikaans accent, in a pleasantly deep voice. The recessed church doorway, when we came to it, was indeed hidden from the road behind a hedge, but I still had zero intention of spending the night in there with a total stranger.

   We decided to sit for a while on a grassy verge with a tea-room  on one side of us and a caravan park on the other. Campers were moving around inside their lit caravans, and tramping to the ablution block with dishes to wash.

   His name was Kobus. He brought out a packet of tobacco and rolled a cigarette in old newspaper. We sat there smoking it. In these surroundings, after a shitty day of hitching, it was one of the best cigarettes I've ever tasted. Then he suggested buying some slapchips, along with bread and milk at the tea-room. I was literally broke. I'd been meaning to draw some money with my Absa cashcard, but the nearest machine was in town, miles away.
   'No problem,' Kobus said. 'It's on me.'
   Inside the tea-room the coloured woman behind the counter gave us a funny look; we must have been an odd looking couple. In the bright light, with his gaunt, deeply tanned face, he looked even wilder than he had out on the road. His ragged suit was reasonably clean, but it was obvious he slept in the open. He'd told me on the verge that the two bags slung over each shoulder were for keeping his clean clothes separate from his dirty ones. As for myself, with my trendy hiking boots and spotless backpack I looked like a boy from the burbs who'd gotten himself lost. 

   Back on the grassy verge, eating our slapchips, Kobus told me how he'd ended up on the road. One day he'd gone home early to find his wife sleeping with another man. He killed the man - he didn't say how, and I didn't ask - and then phoned the cops himself. When he finished his term - I think he said fourteen years, reduced to seven for good behaviour - he said he couldn't adjust to normal society. So he hit the road, and he'd been on it ever since. He had daughters scattered around the country, and he dropped in on them now and then. When he did he said they intentionally got him drunk on Old Brown Sherry to get him to tell his road stories. He carried a wicked looking panga, curved like a Gurkha knife, in one bag. He said in all his years of roving around he'd picked up very little trouble. He avoided the big cities like the plague. In the towns that lay on his route around the country he had regular customers who employed him, or found work for him. On the walk back from the intersection he'd pointed out a house where a woman paid him for cutting her grass. Down in Simonstown, where he was bound,  he said someone always found him work in a fish factory. 

And that was Kobus' story. I don't want to romanticise what must be a brutally hard existence, but he made it sound almost appealing, in a picaresque kind of way. We found a spot opposite the caravan park, beneath a big spreading oak, and bedded down for the night. I used my backpack as a pillow and  fell asleep around eleven. I remember waking with a start when Kobus turned over suddenly. He made a soothing, clucking noise, reprimanding me for my anxiety. He was right. I'd woken thinking he was about to attack me. 
   Around four in the morning the wind picked up and it became too cold to sleep. I didn't have much on to keep me warm - two t-shirts and a thin hiking jacket, but he had even less: a thin shirt under his grey jacket. We got up and crept past the one-man sentry box at the entrance to the camp. I'm not sure if anyone was inside there but we took no chances and made no noise. Then we snuck into the ablution block and had delicious hot showers. When he undressed his torso was covered with those crude blue tattoos you get in prison. We passed the soap back and forth over the tops of our booths. Then we snuck out and walked down the road towards the intersection On the way we'd planned too make a fire but we never got round to it. We sat on a log instead and smoked. With grey light seeping over the horizon we parted at the intersection - he heading up, me down. The last I saw of him, skylighted on the top of the hill, he was climbing into the back of another pick-up truck. He waved as he sank down over the top of the hill. I got my ride about half an hour later, all the way to Durban.

THE TREK BEGINS

I left Durban around nine in the morning and headed up the N3, trying to absorb the sights instead of driving in the unseeing dreamy dwall that I usually fall into behind the wheel. I had my journal perched on my lap and I was developing the knack of writing while I drove, looking down to spot a line every now and then. Past Pietermaritsburg I left clear skies and drove into rolling cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon like grey cat's fur.
Soon I was passing Mooi River. I decided to have a look at Bruntville township. It was layed out in depressing pink and blue rows, like little monopoly houses, on a hill opposite the town. These were the modern Reconstruction and Development homes made from hollow cinder blocks. They looked far better in their drab but honest original grey than they did painted the horrible mock-happy pastel pinks and blues.
I was determined to drive around the townships to get a balanced view of the country. What I really felt, once I was inside, was ridiculous. I trundled down dirt roads beneath this depressing unbroken cloud cover and peered into peoples homes. They were hanging up their washing and sitting around their front doors in ripped out car chairs with the springs popping out. They stared blankly back at me as I drove past. I felt cheaply voyeuristic, so obviously like a white man come to check out how the Natives live. To get around this I tried to look distracted while I trundled around - like a quantity surveyor say, or - with my Cannon out - like a roving photographer for Life magazine. All this did in the end was make me feel more ridiculous.
I passed drab, teetering conglomerations of rusty shacks thrown together with patchwork corrugated iron. They and the monopoly homes, as impersonal as pump-houses, sat on barren patches of red earth. An occassional rectangle of scraggly vegetables passed for a garden.
A pre-primary school the size of a small scout hall was painted a brave buttercup yellow. 'Education Is Freedom' was written in large black letters on one wall. In the distance I saw a larger two storey high-school. It's red bricks looked raw and new jutting out of the grungy groundcover of shacks. I passed goats roaming the dirt roads, the bells around their necks clonking dolefully. Spud, with the upper half of his body protruding outside his window, went taught with excitement whenever we passed one. I had to grab him by the tail to prevent him from baling out the window. The goats watched him nervously with those demonic yellow eyes of theirs, with the horizotal black slots for pupils, and clonked quickly away down the road. (Spud lost it a few times later in the trip. I'd be cruising slowly along a dirt road when he'd go scrabbling over the window sill with a little squeal and find himself in the middle of a herd of unimpressed cows and the odd bull. All I had to do was pull over and open the door and he would come scuttling back with shocked flat ears and a look that said
Groups of dudes standing on the roadside beside the open doors of battered taxis gave me knowing, jaundiced looks as I cruised past. But after this initial look, if I passed them again, they ignored me. As I was leaving, driving over the bridge spanning the highway, I passed a grizzled old man trudging towards Bruntville. His once blue overalls were faded grey. He was holding a sickle blade, worn down to a thin rind from repeated sharpening. When I pulled over to take a photo of him he told me he had helped build the monopoly houses. He said they took about a week to build. Although the light was bad for taking photo's - the low cloud cover muted the hills and Bruntville and Mooi River across the way with a gloomy drabness - I gave him R5 and asked him to pose beside the bridge railing. A row of pink monopoly houses were in shot behind him. As I took the photograph a coloured man in a panelbeaten blue Mazda 323 passed us heading into Bruntville. His head whipped around and he did a squealing u-turn and rushed back to where the Uno was parked on the shoulder of the offramp.
'Ay Bra!How's it going! Taking photo's?' he asked, leaning out of window and yelling at me, like he was a chommie; but also with a proprietory air, like he was on the town council and had a right to know. He had a large, meaty head with quick, alert little eyes. He looked like a family man who had braais with his choms but got mean with a few quarts inside him. A skinny boy sat beside him, probably his son.
'I saw you back there too,' he went on, pointing at Bruntville. 'Do you work for the papers?'
'Yes,' I said, trying for a friendly professional demeanour.
'Which one?' he asked.
'The Daily News.'
'Ya? So what are the photo's for?' His head gave a little questioning backward nod, still friendly: I'm not interrogating you chommie, I'm just shooting the breeze here.
'For this article I'm doing, ' I said lamely, putting the lens back on my Cannon and shuffling cagily to the Uno. I could feel I wasn't up to carrying this lie off. My township experience had not gone well; my famed photojournalist persona needed bolstering with a few Stouts.
'Ya? What's the article about?' he asked, giving another backward nod of his head, slower this time, more measured and questioning. His little black eyes had settled on me. It felt like he was cornering me into admitting that I'd been slumming it, peering through kitchen windows at how the other half lived. And the thing is, that is exactly how I did feel. If I was there to build houses or write an article fair enough. But to just drive around, a white pleb from the Burbs, creeping fearfully around the savage township, peering into people's homes - it just wasn't on somehow. Beside me the old man was hovering on the grassy verge, his hands clasped before him, holding his worn out blade. He was watching us with rheumy eyes, his head cocked attentively to one side.
'It's just an article I'm doing,' I said weakly.
He peered at me dubiously, waiting for more. I said nothing and climbed into the Uno.
'And what about the dog?' he asked me.
I looked at Spud for a few seconds, then back at him; but he stared right back with a half smile, giving another backward nod of his head, along with a playfull flicker of his eyebrows: I'm just shooting the breeze here chommie. Spud had his head out of the window, ears cocked, listening to the sound of the goats clonking their bells in the field beside us. When one bleated he hung his front legs outside his window and his arse quivered. The old man lost interest in proceedings and began to shuffle wearily up the road towards Bruntville.
'The dog?' I said. 'He keeps me company.'
'Ay, now that's a fierce dog man! Those dogs bite people. Tell me' - he grinned again - 'does he keep you safe while you drive around?'
His son had been sitting bored beside him. Now he looked around his father's shoulder at me and grinned. Dad was tuning this white oke!
'He's a friendly dog. He's never bitten anyone,' I said. This was true. 'He likes goats though.'
'Ya, I can see that. Tell me, which paper do you work for again?'
Fuck this prick. I'd had enough. 'The Daily News. Have a good day mate.'
I plonked my Cannon, which I'd been stuffing into its bag, onto the dashboard and started the Uno. The man's face tightened. He had kept his engine running. Now, keen to be first off the mark, he rammed it into gear and took off in a tight half circle, engine screaming, back towards Bruntville. As he did so he stuck his head out the window and yelled, putting his disdain into it now that the polite groove of the conversation was over, 'Ya Bra! I hope that dog keeps you verrry safe!
As the Mazda came round his son gave me a receding look that said, Whiteys, slippery customers, you can't trust them. Dad thrashed the Mazda quickly into third and then back into second as he almost skidded to a halt beside the old man. The old man leant over, speaking into the passenger window, while the father leant across, his large well-fed head - community man - framed in the gloomy rectangle of the rear window. The old man bobbed with gratitude and climbed into the back seat, and as he did so the large head turned back to look at me: See Chommie, life is hard but we take care of our own here. Take your dog and fancy camera and fuck off.

I looked Bruntville up on the Internet. In two massacres there, in 1989 and 1991, Inkatha hostel dwellers killed over thirty UDF supporters. In 1997 a white lawyer from Kloof (a small, posh suburb outside Durban) was given a R24 million contract to build 1400 low-cost RDP houses in Bruntville: the pastel monopoly horrors. The lawyer ran this building company as a sideline to his law business. A profitable sideline, as it turned out. The project was billed as the flagship of the RDP housing scheme in Natal. The lawyer took a R22 million payment and emigrated to New Zealand. He left the majority of houses without concrete foundations, water, electricity, toilets, windows or proper roofing. The SA Minister of Housing at the time estimated it would cost another R22 million to repair the houses. He vowed to extradite the lawyer, who it seems is still living in comfort in the land of the long white cloud.

CRIMES OF A SERIOUS HACKING NATURE

I've always loved hitching. I love the feeling of losing msyelf in my surroundings, in the long walks to better spots, and in the intimate chats I have with complete strangers. So when I flew into a warm March afternoon at Jan Smuts, after a few years in London, I put my thumb out and headed for my sister's place in Secunda.

Very soon though, it all felt horribly wrong. The highway was a brutal, juddering horror of screaming metal and closed, suspicious faces. I was slightly drunk, and it was getting late - half past three - and I had valuables on me. My fancy leather jacket was folded over my arm, and my Cannon camera was tucked into my backpack. I felt like a walking beacon for any enterprising mugger as I trudged along, and it felt like every eighteen wheeler bellowing past in the slow lane was out to get me - wing me on the hip and leave me to die a slow death, in full view of this rushing, paranoid horde.

I managed to get to Bocksburg just before five. I found the taxi-ranks and walked around in the fading light until I found a ride. Then I sat in the back seat waiting for the taxi to fill up. This wasn't so bad for the first hour, because there were quite a few seats that needed to be filled. But during the second hour, when it got dark and there wasn't enough space left for a piccanin, we all began to grumble.

Eventually the driver strode up and we set off. We rocked along quietly, no one making a sound in the creaking little space, until the small man beside me began to ask questions. There was something in his tone that I didn't trust, so when he asked me where I was from I told him England. I thought this had a nice, neutral ring to it.

"Yes,' he said. 'England is a nice place. The black people there are not treated like animals, like they are here. Here the black live like animals, in the locations' - he hissed the word. What did I think about this? Did I think it was fair, that the white people had everything, while the black people had nothing? He was talking quietly but urgently, and his voice was getting louder. I could barely see him. He was just a small presence beside me in the dark, pressing against my shoulder.

'No, that sounds wrong,' I said nervously, thick tongued from the beers I'd drunk earlier at Jan Smuts. I made an effort to sound like a happy tourist. 'But I don't know anything about this. In England everyone is the same, everyone is equal.' I shifted uncomfortably and my leather jacket, folded and bulky and aromatic in my lap, creaked slightly. Everyone else was silent, listening.

'Yes, but do you think is fair that people are made to live like animals, while the white people do not live like animals?'

No, I didn't think this was fair at all. I could see where this was heading: You are a white man, and you have everything, so you must give me something because I have nothing. He kept crowding me in the dark and I kept fending him off and trying to keep the conversation casual. I think if I'd pretended to be a hard nosed Boer, or if I'd just been honest and said I was South African, he would have left me alone. But as a dorky tourist I was asking to be fleeced. I sensed in the quietly bobbing heads that the rest of the taxi wanted him to shut up; but I also sensed, in the distant, brooding quality of the silence, that no-one disagreed with him either.

He grew gradually louder and more insistent, until I eventually just turned away and ignored him. I pressed my nose against the cool pane of the window and stared at the headlights bearing down on the dark stretch of highway to Secunda. After a while he gave up and left me alone.

We drove into Embahlenhle township outside Secunda. I'd been here once before at night, when I'd been hitching and had to catch a taxi to escape the dark. I'd been expecting all sorts of horrors, but it had turned out ok. This time, however, we went nowhere near the bright busy centre of the township. Instead we turned off early, and ended up at a derelict one-pump petrol station. In the black glass of the battered pump cherry red numbers glowed, and the nozzle was unlocked; but there was no sign of an attendant. If he was inside the shell-shocked little building he was locked in, because wire-mesh frames barricaded the door and windows.

The driver parked behind the building and everyone piled out and disappeared into the night. I followed him as he wandered around to the pump. He stood frowning in the weak light flickering down from a single fluorescent tube on the garage roof. Was he searching for the non-existent attendant? I joined him and asked about a ride to Secunda.
'You must take one of those taxi's,' he said, pointing at two dimly white rectangular shapes on the road, out in the black. I walked towards them, and I thought: now this is more like the township of my nightmares. The air was thick with wood and coal smoke from cooking fires. I could smell it, and I could see it drifting past in the baleful islands of yellow light where tall security lights hovered at regular intervals over the crusty floor of the rooftops. It was only when I neared the first Hi-Ace that I saw the two teenage guys standing by its open doors. I asked the more smartly dressed of the two, the one wearing a shiny green Kappa shirt, about a ride to Secunda.

'You must go ask the driver of that taxi,' he said, pointing to the second white Hi-Ace, about ten metres away. It was parked facing away from us, tilted slightly down where two wheels rested off the road. A shadow slouched against the side facing away from the road. The two teenagers began walking over, and I followed them. As we walked I watched a figure emerge from the dark wall of the road ahead. It grew into a white shirt that passed by with a sliding glimmer of eyeballs and the faintest gleam on the knob of a cheekbone. Then we were at the second Hi-Ace. I had my hand in my jacket pocket, holding my stylish Kershaw fold-out blade. I felt for the notch at the base off the blade, so I would know which was to flick it open. The shadow came away from the side of the Hi-ace and the sliding door murmured slightly on its runners. He was tall, and I could just make out, in the exhausted light coming from the petrol station, that he had a beard and a large afro.

He looked at me, while the two teenagers flanked me, and he said simply, 'Give me some money.' My heart gave a single great thump and my scalp froze, became ether. His head seemed suddenly the size of a zeppelin. It loomed over me, and in the dim light my binocular eyes sucked in every detail of his sly, brooding face. A thin scar sliced across his forehead. Above it the outline of his afro was a black corona eating into the electric blue black of the night. I'd seen this face somewhere before, on Police File, where Micheal DeMorgen in his sensible square glasses reminded us to keep our doors locked and under no circumstances to confront Mr Afro as he was extremely dangerous and had committed many crimes of a serious hacking nature ... the bearded head frowned and beneath it the shoulders shifted uncomfortably. The head spoke. "If you want me to go to Secunda you must give us some money. There is only you and these two boys. You must give me extra, otherwise I can't take you. It will be too expensive.'
I became aware of the two young guys looking at me hopefully. 'If you've got forty Rand I can take you,' the driver said. He took my silence as deliberation and added matter of factly, 'There's no more rides to Secunda, and if you stay here it's going to be bad for you.'

I hauled my wallet out with trembling fingers and brought it close to my face. Three green tens glimmered faintly. I took them out and, holding them pinched between two fingers, pulled my wallet wide and held it out so they could see. 'It's all I've got - thirty Rand. It's my beer money! I heard as if from a slight distance my voice braying too loudly, laced with hysteria.

The two teenagers laughed obligingly, but the driver gave me a brooding look. "O.K I can take you.' He took the tens and I climbed into the back and sent the sliding door rasping shut; the two teenagers piled happily into the front. We set off and I sat back with my hand in my pocket, fondling my Kershaw fold out blade. I'd completely forgottten about it during my crisis. After a while we lurched over a big pothole and the three heads bobbed in tandem. Where the hell where we going? The last time I'd caught a taxi from here we'd emerged from the brawl of shack within minutes. Now we were driving deeper and deeper into a dark maze of dirt roads. We dipped into a grim isolated depression where rubbish was dumped. Then we passed a sinister clump of bushes on a quiet stretch of road between shacks. Each time I thought here: this is where they're going to pull over and chop and hack me to death.
But we kept going, and going, jouncing over the potholes, until suddenly and blessedly the shacks fell away and we were hissing on tar beside what seemed to be an open stretch of countryside. Even here though, when we pulled over to drop the two teenagers at a mysterious little dirt road that led to nowhere - to a grim, deserted farmhouse, with scull fragments littering the floor, and a human tooth embedded in the wall - I thought: here, where no-one can hear me scream. But they merely climbed out and gave me the thumbs up and yelled, 'Bra, thanks man!' as they slammed the door.

We drove past the million tiny lights of the two Sasol plants glittering on the veld like a vast, intricate fairy city in the cold night. And then this big, brooding driver took me right past the dangerous taxi-ranks on the outskirts of town, right into the heart of the Dutchman suburbs where my sister lived - and where he was clearly uncomfortable, nervously watching for cop cars and crazed vigilantes cruising about under the guise of Neighbourhood Watch. When he dropped me off he grunted at me impatiently as I tried to put too much heart into my farewell. And then he sped off, leaving me within yards of my sister's front door. For my thirty Rand I got doorstep treatment.

PERIMETER MAN

I couldn't resist it. Before I hit the road I hit one of the pubs in Jan Smuts and had a few Milk Stouts. Then, adequately fortified, I made my way down an escalator. I wasn't sure where I was going. All I knew was that I wanted to get onto the freeway that ran in front of the airport. From there I could hitch to Boksburg, and from Boksburg I could get onto the N17 that goes straight to Secunda.

The escalator led to the underground carpark. I watched in a drunken trance as the grooved silver stairs flattened and slid into the ground. I had to be careful stepping off because my rucksack pressed down on my back like a small piano. I had my IBM Thinkpad in there, along with my Cannon camera. My new leather jacket bulked stiffly in the crook of my arm. As I lumbered flat footed onto solid ground my lower back throbbed. A queue was waiting to stick money into the car-park ticket machine. I stepped around them, careful not to sidesweep anyone behind me with my pot-bellied backpack, and peered into the gloom of the carpark. A bright circle of daylight marked the exit at the far end.

I emerged from the cool concrete gloom into white light and stood blinking like a gnome at the mouth of his cave. Coming from a dark London winter I was bewildered by light. The sun hung almost directly overhead - a great white ball in a sky bleached like bone by the heat. My scalp crawled and felt tight and itchy as the rays penetrated my crew-cut.

Squinting fiercely, I began walking down a narrow one-way road. There were no pavements so I had to crab along on a grassy bank. Ahead was a blind corner. Between me and the corner a tall thin palm grew from the bank. I squinted up at its drooping leaves, like brightly rimmed grey cutouts in the baleful glare. My eyeballs ached. I trudged on and felt sweat trickle out of my armpit and down my side. Lovely. A red Polo Golf swept around the corner, a small hissing screeee coming from the tyres as they bit into the tar. Two young black men were talking and laughing in the front seats. Their windows were wide open and the car rushing at me between the quiet grassy banks somehow catapulted their voices high into the air above the golf - up near the glowing grey palm leaves.
I stood staring foolishly, a pale hermit crab caught without its shell, drooping with its treasures, while they bore down on me and I was able to see in a single intimate frame looking down into the passenger window a packet of Camels in the pocket of a lilac shirt. He had his head turned towards the driver and there was some sort of gold inlay on the side of his sunglasses. Their voices and the heavy beat of what could have been Kwaito crescendoed, and then they were gone. I stared after them. The Golf climbed a hill and floated over the crest,with nothing but sky ahead of it, so the two heads were perfectly outlined. I wanted to see if they looked back, or if the heads inclined towards their rear view mirrors, but it was as if I didn't exist. The Golf sank from sight like a small boat going down.

I crabbed on. For a stricken second I'd been convinced they were going to pull over and mug me. What was I doing out here? Other people, normal people, with families and loved ones to collect them, were walking through the airport, emerging through swishing automatic doors and climbing into air conditioned cars. Why was I stumbling around out here on the perimeter like a hobo?

S.A MAR 2006 - METALLICA AND THE ATTRACTIVE BLONDE

After working my last night at the Bud brewery I caught the tube to Barking, walked up the frozen slippery street in the grey dawn, and crawled into bed in my tiny cubicle for the last time. I woke a few hours later in the empty house and had a shower. Then I dropped my key through the lounge window for Jane to find later and I left for Heathrow.
I'd spent a little over four years in London, all of it working. I could have tried to make a life there - buy a car, property, travel around Europe. But I was locked out of London life. The experiences of J.M Coetzee in his book Youth most closely resembled my own. He says something like, 'London, a cold, grey city, where merely to stay alive means hanging on all the time, trying not to fall.' That was it for me too.

My flight drifted down into Jan Smuts at about one on a cloudless Joburg afternoon. I sat beside a strawbery-blonde from Escourt who said 'Fuck!' at every opportunity; she rolled her eyes and said, 'Jesus Christ! give me strength!' whenever the stewardess committed some offence that I couldn't see; and when I asked her, innocently enough, how old she was, she said prissily, 'That's not the sort of question you ask a lady!' I thought: I'd like you to meet Mike. She looked to be about twenty-one. She was taking a break from some arty course in London, and I bet the poor folk of Estcourt were soon going to find out what a backward place they lived in.

There was a large crowd waiting for us in the arrivals area - although there was no-one waiting for me. I planned to hitch to my sister's place in Secunda. I stood to one side for a while and watched as a tall, classy blonde suddenly dropped her bags and ran squealing to her family. She held her hands up and ran with exaggeratedly quick, short steps, clacking her heels on the tiles. Her mom shrieked and ran through the crowd with the same comically short steps - both of them clacking in a send up of their own excitement.
The Mom was as good looking as the daughter, with expensively tousled honey-white hair and good legs in tan leather pants. The father was lean and tanned, the younger sister willowy, the brother rosy cheeked. They were exactly the sort of family I expected to see at airports, picking kin up from overseas jaunts.

What caught my attention, however, was the family beside them. When the blonde ran across to her Mom a hulking, round shouldered oke in his early twenties swagggered self-consciously over to his family. He wore a black t-shirt with Metallica scrawled in the form of bolted steel plates across the front. His green Billabong cap was jammed so tightly on his head his ears stuck out. When he got near his family he stopped and rocked back and held his arms out in a sort of grandiose gesture. On cue they all shuffled forward in a group into the space allocated them between his outspread fingertips. His Ma's bulk quivered in a white t-shirt with a yellow day-glo Minnie Mouse on the front. It reached half way down thick, sturdy thighs which were encased in white leggings so tight they were semi-tranparent. When she got to him she reached up with both hands to cup his cheeks, and her own meaty cheeks mottled with emotion. The embaressed Pa smiled around a drooping moustache and reached out to pat his son on the shoulder. The two lanky boets in their backward facing caps flanked him and and started poking him in the ribs, bobbing in and out like clumsy puppies. Ma's hand kept fluttering out to touch his cheek. While he spoke she kept chiming in and then stopping and pulling her head into her shoulders and looking up at him with a pursed mouth and arched, amazed eyebrows - as if she couldn't believe that this dazzling man of the world was really her son.

Then the one boet noticed the blonde still talking animatedly to her family beside them. He dug a raw, knobbly elbow into Metallica's ribs and inclined his head in the blonde's direction. Metallica swivelled his head with the little green cap clamping the top of it and checked out the blonde for a good five seconds. Then he turned back to his goggling family and slowly raised his hand and gripped his chin. Then, still gripping his chin, he arched an eyebrow way up under the peak of his little cap and gave his family a big, slow nod, as if to say: hmmm, not bad, I might have a word with her once I've finished telling you lot about my adventures.

This was not the kind of family I expected to see waiting at airports for their kin to return from overseas jaunts. But then security companies and construction sites in London were crawling with okes like Metallica. I often saw them huddled together looking bewildered and kwaai beneath their fringes, telling each other that hierdie fokken Engelsmanne was naby so fokken swak as die fokken kaffers. The oke I overheard saying this would probably never have left his dorp, tucked into a quiet region of the Noordlike Transvaal, or perhaps there in the far reaches of the Westelike Kaap, daar by Nababiep or Bitterfontein. But with things being the way they are, and the fokken kaffers taking all the jobs, what choice did he have?

LONDON MAR 2006 - MY BIG SILVA ROVA

I worked with Mike on my last night in London. At six on a cold, dark January morning, while drizzle floated down through the yellow light of the streetlamps outside our guard-house, we drank a final cup of coffee together. Mike had just wandered in from the conference room. His face was so puffy with sleep his eyes had an oriental slant to them. He hunched broodingly over his cup of coffee on his side of the office. Rivulets of water running down the window cast flickering shadows on his bald troll's head. Then he cleared his throat and looked at me. We had worked well together during the last month, foiling every attempt the Pakistani made to catch us sleeping, so a final friendly chat seemed in order.

   'Are South African gals fit?' Mike asked, falling back on a tried and trusted topic. His words came out in such a slurred mash I had to wait a few seconds for their meaning to become clear. I often had to ask him to repeat a sentence a few times before I understood him.
   'Not as fit as Nigerian girls, but they're ok,' I said. 
   'Will you find some nice gals in South Africa?' Mike asked, lifting one eyebrow and smiling a bit shyly. It was this shyness that redeemed Mike for me. He'd told me his favourite place for finding women was on the university campus in Lagos, where he cruised about in his 'Big silva Rova, six silindas. Those young gals love my silva Rova!'
   I said, 'Durban girls are ok. On the beach they shower naked sometimes.'
  'Black gals?' Mike asked. I nodded. 

  'Do you fook black gals?'
  This was a delicate topic. How could I tell Mike that when I was at the old black beaches in Durban and I saw the girls showering naked I usually looked away. If I saw an eighteen year old with firm joggling breasts and an upright bum I might feel a stirring, but I kept it well repressed. If she was white, or coloured, or Indian, with that figure ... but because she was a raw African, fresh off a Putco bus from some kraal in the Natal Midlands, yelling gleefully in the showers while soap suds flew and her Pep store panties hung over the shower wall - it just wasn't on. I knew that it happened, obviously, and that history was full of stories involving white farmers sneaking off to the black girls' quarters at night. I wondered how long would it take me, if I was locked in a room with that firm bodied eighteen year old, to overcome my conditioning. 
   'Would you fook a Nigerian gal?' Mike asked, curling one side of his mouth up in a smile again. I felt cornered and I wondered, not for the first time, what blacks from other parts of Africa see when they speak to white South Africans. What had Lokie said? 'But Nigerians is different to our kaffers!' It was true. Nigerians didn't know how to be spoken down to. They didn't have servility as a national characteristic in a country where to be proud and outspoken might get your head stamped on. Lokie would yell at Mike, 'Jussie, Mike, you're a funny oke man! I like to fook! Mike would just grin lazily, and say nothing. 

   I thought about the black girls I'd seen around London, with their rock hard bottoms and graceful necks. 'Yes,' I said to Mike, 'I would.' 

and I said to Mike, 'Yes.' 

   'Ha!' Mike's eyes flared appreciatively in the gloom.  'All white men like to fook black girls, but they don't want to say it.'

   'Not all black girls wand to fuck white men though.'

   'Ha!' Mike said again, less appreciatively this time. 'You mustn't worry about that. If you speak nicely to them they'll fook you.' 

   Behind him two blurry, dazzling disks of light grew larger in the scurrying rain.   A red and white Bud truck rumbled slowly up to his widow. It was the last Bud truck I would see. 

   Mike creaked out of his chair, clipboard in hand, and grinned at me. 'You must just go home and have a good time. And if you find a black woman you must just fook her. Then you will see! And maybe one day I will come to South Africa and I will fook some nice white gals. '

   The thought of Mike crouched like a troll over a white South African woman filled me with distaste. But then I thought of some of the prissier Durban North girls I'd known, and I grinned back at him and said, 'Right!'

LONDON FEB 2006 - LIVING THE SPY LIFE

Life at the Bud brewery had taken a turn for the bizzare. Bud employed Trident security, but they were unhappy with Trident, so some genius at Bud came up with the idea of bringing Crusader (my company) in to work alongside Trident for a month. At the end of the month the best company would be awarded the new security contract. This meant I was the sole Crusader representative amongst a gang of paranoid Trident guards. They were all convinced that I was there to discredit them and to win the contract for Crusader.

I was oblivious to it all though, at first. My company had sent me in without telling me anything. I thought it was odd that I was the only one wearing a Crusader uniform, so I asked the Pakistani supervisor about this. He told me he thought Bud was being very unfair, and did I know that he had a wife and a kid? When I stared blankly at him he added quickly, 'But don't get me wrong! Bud is a good company. There is good people wot works here. But some of the independent truckers is spreading rumours about Trident, and misleading Bud.'

Right. Something was going on between Bud, and Trident, and Crusader, but all I cared about was that I had a month of work to get through - six night shifts a week, at £7.50 an hour. I was working with Mike, who was something of a social outcast in his own right, and the two of us were happy in our own way: Mike phoned his whores, and counted the days until he flew back to Lagos for his fook spree; I was saving money, and counting the days until my flight back to SA at the end of my working month.

I enjoyed going on patrols. The brewerey was huge, and it would take an hour to cover all the check points. Some areas were brightly lit, like the hangar-sized room where endless streams of Bud bottles jiggled along on conveyor belts. They created a clinking, musical cacophany like the din of small birds. Other areas were dark and eerie: massive cube shaped buildings with no windows; sheer corrugated iron walls, creepily lit with security lights shining up from the ground, making a staggering monster of my shadow. Steam was constantly hissing all around, sometimes billowing into the sky, backlit for a nice ghostly effect, to remind me of the wierd chemical processes going on in the making of Bud.
There was a tall, rectangular building like a launching pad, made from corrugated iron. It had a stairwell up the centre of it, leading to rooms where people in white coats arranged beakers of labelled beer formulas on tables. They took samples from the beakers with ear-drop dispencers, and tested them in advanced looking machines that winked and flashed, making sure the Bud taste was maintained. The procedure had a hushed, important air, as if an important medical breakthrough was being made. Mind you, it would be serious, if Bud was sent out tasting like Heineken.

When Mike had the night off one of a string of grubby Ghanain guards filled in for him. Mike generally slept more than I did, but these Ghanains were terrible. It wasn't unusual for them to pass out at eleven and sleep solidly until five the next morning. This meant that I had to scuttle back and forth, signing trucks in and out.

After perhaps two weeks of this a tall, gaunt Ghanain with a filthy collar arrived and promptly passed out. He lay sprawled in his chair, with his head hanging back and his mouth wide open, snoring loudly.
'Sod me! I wouldn't mind having his job!' the truckers said, looking in the window and grinning, while I weighed their trucks and signed their paper work and grew grimmer and grimmer. After three hours of this I'd had enough, so I phoned the Pakistani supervisor in his South guard-house. Thinking that I was planning some elaborate set-up, he went and roused the Bud site manager and brought him along. He thought, I learned later, that if he hadn't brought the manager I would have said, 'Aha! You didn't bring the site manager, when it clearly states in the security manual that you must!' The gaunt Ghanain was never seen at Bud again, and the darkest suspicions of the Trident guards were confirmed: I was a covert agent, sent to discredit Trident and win the contract for Crusader.

'But I just wanted you to crap on him. He's your guy!' I said to the Pakistani supervisor.
He gave me a sly look and said nothing.
I tried, weakly, to defend myself to the other guards. 'I didn't mean for him to get caught. He was sleeping by eight! I only wanted the Indian to wake him up!'
'Yes, but maybe the man has got some problems at home. Maybe he has got no home! You must give a man a chance,' they said, looking at me with distrust and dislike. I felt like saying, yes, but every one of you buggers comes to work with a story about having to shop all day for your sick friend, or - a favourite story - about how a girlfriend needed satsifying. 'I told her no, I need to work tonight. But she is coming to my home. She is banging on the door! She is saying, Sam! Sam! Let me in. Ha! Then she is keeping me awake the whole day!'

All I said was, 'I feel bad. I've never ratted on anyone in my life.'
'Ho! You feel bad,' they said, mocking me. I was so desperate to show them what a decent guy I was that I let them sleep all night. But they still lurched awake and looked around them wildly when I made a noise, thinking I'd brought the site-mananger.
One night I was working with Mike and he said to me, 'Ay! Do you know that Indian man thinks you are a spy?'
'How do you know?' I asked.
'He told all of us. He put us together and he said, that Crusader man is a spy! You must watch out for him! He is going to take your jobs.'
'Jesus Mike, you don't think that, do you?'
Mike looked at me groggily. 'Me, I don't care. I don't worry about this business. I like gals! I like to fook!'

LONDON JAN 2006 - SQUATTING JUST LIKE A DOG

During my time at the Bud brewerey I stayed with some Zimbabweans in Barking, out in zone four. We all slept upstairs - the couple, Branco and Ashleigh, in one bedroom, Branco's younger brother Jody in the other. I had a sort of walk in closet which I paid sixty pounds a week for.

I'd known Branco and Ashleigh a little before I moved in, and thought them quite normal; but I was soon to think otherwise. Whenever I finished work the procedure at the house was usually the same. I bought a bottle of Vodka, or Jody bought one, and we stood in the kitchen and drank it. Branco and Ashleigh sat in the lounge, on a dark lounge suite which gave off an iridescent sheen, like radioactive sludge, and they exchanged rotten looks as the noise in the kitchen increased. There was some bad feeling about Jody because they felt he drank too much and was irresponsible - not saving his money and so on. I didn't think so - he was pretty sharp - but I'd stayed in enough London house-shares to know to stay out of squabbles. After a while Jody would go upstairs to phone his girlfriend in Yorke, and I stumbled into the lounge and quickly dried up. Ashleigh's brother happened to be an alchoholic, she informed me. Back in Zim he crashed his car all the time and had to be restrained at weddings, and - Ashleigh said this very seriously - he shat in the garden, squatting down just like a dog. As a result she had no time for slurring fools. Fair enough. After this story even I resolved to cut down on my boozing for a while.

This resove was usually undermined, however, by a domestic crisis unfolding while I was sitting there watching Fame Academy, or Reach For The Stars, or The Dating Game. One memorable crisis was ignited by Branco's predilection for the latest cell phone. His newest acquisition, about the size of a postage stamp, was sitting on the chemically irridescent armrest of Ashleigh's chair. This phone was bugging the shit out of her, gleaming there like a malignant little jewel. She couldn't stretch out, it was getting in the way, so when Branco went into the kitchen she quickly put it on the carpet beside her chair.

Branco came back in and sat down without seeing it. We were all watching The Dating Game. A hunk was firing questions at three women sitting behind a screen. 'And what do you do for a fun time?" he asked a plump brunette.
'Well, if you wine me, dine me, and sweep me off my feet, I'll be your good time girl any day of the week!' Rapturous laughter and applause.
'She wants to give him one!' Branco said. Then his head snapped to the side. He jumped up from his chair and stood over Ashleigh, in line with her view of the tv, and told her with quiet menace to pick up his phone. Ashleigh refused to budge. She peered at his crotch, which was blocking her view of the tv, and she cocked her head to better hear the sound, which was blaring.

Branco shifted a little on his feet and loomed over her. 'Ashleigh ... I'm not going to tell you again ... Ashleigh, pick up my phone.'
Ashleigh's eyes glazed over and her head went very still, but she continued to stare intently at his crotch. She even went so far as to look interested when Cilla introduced a new contestant. Branco began to sweat. 'Ashleigh ... you know how I feel about my phones ... Ashleigh ... Ashleigh! Pick up my phone!'
Ashleigh shook her head - one shake, a defiant spasm - and made a strangled noise in her throat. Then she went back to peering at Branco's crotch with a piqued look, while Branco shifted on his feet and loomed over her and a pleading note crept into his voice. Ashleigh waited just long enough for her victory to be obvious - or until Branco was about to hit her, I couldn't tell which - and then she reached out with a prim look and placed Branco's new phone back on the armrest of her chair.

What was Branco going to do if she hadn't picked it up? Crack her on the head with the tv remote? Grab her by the shoulders and give her one of those vigorous shakings which affect the lining of the brain? I asked Jody. 'Those two are fucking mad,' he said.

LONDON JAN 2006 - I LIKE TO FOOK!

I was impervious to the Pakistani creeping about outside our guardhouse because I knew I'd be leaving the country soon. Mike was impervious for different reasons. His mission in life was, as he put it, to fook. After a few months of security work in London he rushed back to Lagos to fook his brains out. All it seemed to take was a reasonably new car and a few gold chains and it was possible to fook from sunrise to sunset.

'Nigerian gals are fit!' Mike informed me from his side of the office. In the meantime though, while he was stuck in London doing security work and saving up for his fook spree, Mike phoned whores and arranged to meet them the following morning, when his shift was over. When he spoke to these whores his standard line was, not surprisingly, I like to fook! This was invariably followed by him scowling at his feet and launching into five minutes of confused, mumbling negotiation because their prices always seemed to go up after this announcement.

Mike told me, 'You never seen somebody like me. I can poowah seven times!
Poowah? Pour. As in pour your semen. Every time his great buttery buttocks convulsed over some suffering London prostitute that was one pour. In the trade you either pay for the amount of pours, or for the amount of time you spend with the prostitute. If you wanted one pour it was a straight screw, over in say fifteen minutes, and you forked out £40. If you wanted two hours of her time you forked out about £70 and you could pour as many times as you liked. Most men manage about three pours in two hours.

'But me! I poowah seven times! Those gals can't believe it! They never seen someone like me!'

LONDON JAN 2006 - THE CRUMPLED MUTTON CURRIE PIE

That was it for me and social work. I met guys who'd been doing it for years and they were all depressed, sensitive men who looked like they might own Maltese poodles. I left and got a job at Budweiser Brewery out in Mortlake (towards Wimbledon). I was a night-guard again, earning far more than I did doing social work.

I sat in a spacious guard-house with windows all round and signed trucks rattling with Bud bottles into and out of the brewery. The smell of fermenting hops or barley hung over everything. At first I found it pleasant and comforting, like being near a bowl of steaming porridge. Then one night, during my third or fourth shift there, it suddenly became nauseating and gave me a headache. From then on, even when I climbed out of the train down the road and caught a sickly-sweet whiff on the wind, the smell caused a band of pressure to clamp itself above my right eye. I would walk around the plant taking shallow breaths through delicately flared nostrils, trying to cut down on my intake.

My regular night-shift partner was a Nigerian who looked like an out of shape Mike Tyson. He sat at one end of the office and signed trucks in, while I sat at the other end and signed trucks out, or vice versa. When it became really quiet, after twelve, we took turns sneaking off for a kip in an empty conference room in one of the buildings on the plant. We had a devious Pakistani supervisor who worked at the South Office - we were in the North office. He materialised at all times of the night, creeping up from different directions and suddenly rapping on the window beside us, but we found a way to out-fox him. If Mike went for a kip I set my cell phone on his number and kept it in my pocket. Mike kept his cell beside his ear while he slept on the conference room floor. If the Pakistani dropped in I told him that Mike had gone to buy a pie, and I quietly slipped my hand inside my pocket and pressed the call button on my cell. Mike appeared five minutes later, with carpet tile creases on his face, looking for all the world like he'd just woken from a deep sleep. The Pakistani was completely flummoxed. He came two or three times a night sometimes, but we just rolled in relentlessly, yawning and rubbing our eyes, not even bothering to hide the fact that we'd been sleeping.

The Pakistani said to us, 'Man! Are you guys sleeping?' Where's your pie?'

So we began to bring the same foul, rumpled Mutton and Curry pie in with us every night. The Pakistani then tried to impress his work ethic on us.

'Man! Some guys wot sleep on the job is just taking the piss, innit? It's not right to get paid for work wot isn't done, innit?'

Mike and I agreed, and kept on returning with our crumpled pie. In desperation the Pakistani resorted to veiled threats.

'I've got sources wot inform me some guards is sneaking off for forty-winks. Now, I'm not saying that you two is the two, you get me, but I know all about it, and where the forty-winks is taking place. But I've got a kind heart, so I'm going to leave it for now, and if those guards come right then everyfings all right and no more said, right?'

Right. And the next night Mike staggered in with his shirt out, with drool on his chin and a bit of sleep clinging to the corner of his bloodshot eye, holding his Mutton and Curry pie out in front of him.

LONDON DEC 2005 - WALNUT CRACKING THIGHS

The writer Paul Theroux described in his travel book the Iron Rooster how a group of Russian women - hard up housewives - tried to hook him up with the prettiest and youngest member of their group. They propositioned him in a Moscow supermarket, and then took him back to their grim high rise flat. They all sat in the lounge and the women nervously negotiated the price with him and urged him to hurry because one of their husbands was due back at any moment. They expected him to shoot into a tiny back room with the woman and get his rocks off while they all waited nervously in the lounge a few feet away. Paul's ardour was understandably a bit dimmed by all this, but the housewives couldn't understand his reluctance.

'Come! You are man! She is woman! What is problem?'

He eventually escaped, but on a cold November night I found myself in a similar situation. I was working as a night-guard at the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood- a colossal old Victorian building which confronts anyone coming out of the Bethnal Green tube station in the eastern part of London. Built in the shape of a rectangle, with sheer brick walls rising a good fifteen metres on all sides, it looms over the quiet park beside it like a stranded ship. I usually had the place to myself once I locked up, but on the night in question I had a surprise visitor.

Our Ukranian cleaner Roman arrived completely drunk at about ten o'clock. He was determined to go out and find a prostitute for the two of us. I had my psychology books out - I was studying through UNISA - and I was very coldly sober. No problem! We had a soft-play area - a padded room for kids to bounce around in - which was perfect for bouncing a prostitute around in. Roman was not keen to find an English prostitute: they are dirty and fat and at £40 a session they charge too much. For half the price he could find a strong Ukranian woman. Unlike English women, Roman informed me, Ukranian women enjoy having sex with drunk strangers.

Strength featured heavily in Roman's list of requirements. 'Aahhh, loooovly stroooong,' pulling a face like he was sucking on a mouthfull of caviar and bunching his fists out in front of him like a pair of arse cheeks clenching, 'Ukrrrranian woooman.'

I can't lie about this: I was shitting myself. I tried to tell Roman he could have his Ukranian woman all to himself, but this was unthinkable. 'Ah, Krisstoffel, come. Come! You will see. Ukrrranian woman is very good, very strooong, very clean. Not like dirty English bitch! I give you. My treat!'

What could I say? After a while it all started to sound appealing. I could picture this strong Ukranian woman with wicked tilted eyes and thighs that could crack a walnut. Roman went staggering off into the night and I tried to concentrate on Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Aggression - without much success. Three hours later the intercom buzzed and my heart did a little cartwheel. But, a voice dolefully intoned over the speaker, the night had gone very plogo (bad). After scouring the length and breadth of Petticoat Lane and beyond, Roman had finally found a strong Ukranian girl who was willing to earn £20 for an honest night's work. Unfortunatlely she'd had a few more hours of bartending to get through first, and Roman was too wasted from his ongoing intake of Vodka to wait this long.

He came into my office and moped around for a while.

'Aahhh farrrk ... very nice gurrl ... very strrooong,' clenching his fists and shaking his head wistfully; then snapping to with slavonic fatalism. 'But this time not. So! I go now sleep in soft-play.' And off he went. But I heard, 'Faaaarrrrk ... strrrooong ... ' as he staggered up the stairs.

LONDON DEC 2005 - NECROTIC CREVISES

The holiday centre for disabled kids closed after two weeks and my agency got me a job at an old age home. This was bad enough, but I was then assigned to a ward full of old timers with Alzheimers, or mental disorders like schizophrenia, or both. I got to know Bertie there. Bertie was an evil old Jamaican who had lost both legs to diabetes. He would fix me with these sunken-eyed, under the brow looks of incredible cunning and eroticism and ramble on at me in silky, unintelligible patois. The black carers would shriek and yell, 'O Bertie! You are a terrible, evil man!'

Once they'd explained a few words to me I realised that old Bertie was very keen to get his clutches into us. His wife, who looked like she'd poked a few voodoo dolls in her time, would come and sit grimly with him every night, until it was time for her to wheel him off for his bath and bedtucking - and very possibly for a bit of grim relief, because Bertie certainly looked like he was up for it.

The entire day, after I'd run their baths and lowered them into the water with a winch and poked at their necrotic crevises with a flannel - pink flannel for the face, blue flannel for the privates, very mature cheddar in hiding here - after this the day was spent in this one lounge-like room. It had a few chairs and sofas grouped around a tv on one side, and a few dining tables on the other side, with a tiny kitchen near the only door. Three times a day the stainless steel trollies rolled in from downstairs. Places were set and walkers rattled into life and vast quantities of food were drooled on and wasted. One old biddy kept nodding off, drooping forward like a wilting daisy until her head hung a few millimetres above her plate. A few wisps of hair usually dangled in her food. If I guided her hand with the spoon in it to her mouth a few times it got her going for a few creaking, trembly cycles until she conked out again.

Old Bertie was a virile bastard though, and he champed aggressively through whatever was put before him. When mealtime was over the crockery was clattered into the tiny kitchen and great gobs of food (about two thirds of it) were thrust down the food mincer thing in the sink. After this everyone settled down to wait for the next meal and, when all the meals were over, the grande finale: sponge down and bed by 9pm. Up until then I'd spent the entire day in this one room. I could feel the wallpaper, sort of a pureed apricot colour, closing in. The ceiling bulbs bled down a feeble yellow light and, combined with the apricot walls, the ochre carpet - a pea here, a blob of mash potato there - it all seemed soaked in a claustrophobic orange glow.

Most of the old timers had wandered off to their rooms by this stage, but a few die-hards still sat around, gumming placidly into the orange fog. I sat at the table, bleerily trying to read. Bertie's wife sat opposite me, holding old Bertie's hand while she peered stonily at a spot on the wall. Bertie slumped down in his wheelchair, his head was just above the level of the table. I was catching a glitter every now and then, so I knew the old bastard was eyeballing me, but being a professional I ignored him. Then I began to hear this menacing glottal crooning, and I knew it was directed at me, so I looked up. Bertie had me nailed with this ... lasciviously malignant, dewy look while he crooned away. I couldn't understand any of it, but I somehow knew it involved my arse. Every time I responded to a fresh sally of his with an indignant look he went into paroxysms of glee, so eventually I turned to Bertie's wife and said, 'What's this all about?' But she wouldn't even look at me. Her back stiffened a little, she peered through the orange fog at the wall, and I felt the roof coming down a few feet, and the apricot walls closing in. Bertie's gaze was suddenly transfixed by a fly buzzing around a blob of hardened custard on the table, and I went back to my book.

A few days later I was trudging along the corridor with the ochre (brownish-yellow, poo diluted with wee) carpet unravelling before me in grim dream tunnel sequence - no hope of escape, no real proof even of an outside world. The frantic reeek-reeeek of Bertie's wheelchair started up behind me, closing in. I made it through a pair of swing doors and waited there, holding one side of the doors open, while Bertie came panting towards me. He was whispering with hoarse lust, 'C'mon, c'mon, me know you, me know you! You want make jig-jig my backside!' The old bastard could make himself understood when he wanted to. I waited until he was about a third of the way through the door and then let it swing shut on him. As I made my escape down the corridor there was a frantic clattering and a low frustrated moaning, and then Bertie clubbed his way through and he was after me again with a relentless reeeeeek-reeeeek ...

LONDON DEC 2005 - DARRYL'S TURGID WHOPPER

My God, I take my hat off to anyone who makes a career out of social work. It can be brutally depressing. I tried it this last December, as a General Assistant at a holiday centre for disabled kids. I'd meet the bus in the morning and we'd go around and pick these kids up from their homes. Altogether we had about 60 of them at the centre. My main job involved helping the personal carers clean the more severely disabled kids, and change their nappies. For some reason - maybe it was the excitement of being changed - the older boys had erections more often than not when we changed them. There was one black kid, Darryl, about seventeen. True to form, whenever we got Darryl onto the bed this great turgid whopper throbbed into view. His carer, Sarah, was a good looking West Indian woman in her late twenties. We would both peer down at Darryl's member, made to look even bigger by Darryl's shrivelled, paralysed legs, because there was nowhere else to look in the small room. I'd be at Darryl's head holding him steady, and Sarah would be at the other end cleaning him up. She had to delicately hold his dick with a thumb and forefinger to clean around it properly, and whenever she did so Darryl gurgled with pleasure and writhed his strong shoulders back and forth. Sarah usually frowned to hide her embarrassment, and I'd have my hands full trying to hold him steady, but every time we hoisted Darryl onto the bed and his whopper came into view a tangible sexual awareness sprang up between us, as if we were watching porn together. It almost felt, after we'd finished changing Darryl, as if I could come right out and say, look, your place or mine?