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?