UNDER A NON SHELTERING SKY

Just outside Steytlerville in the Karoo, on a narrow concrete road that necessitated a game of chicken with oncoming traffic - someone had to give way and pull over to avoid a head on collision - something in the Uno gave. I actually felt it - the Uno lurched and there was a terrible grinding noise for about fifteen seconds. Then whatever it was was spat out and the terrible grinding subsided slightly, but only slightly.

I made it to Steytlerville and popped the bonnet for a friendly, beefy, bearded Afrikaans mechanic. I'd pulled into his workshop, a delapidated corrugated iron warehouse with the carcasses of tractors and combine harvesters and some very old looking cars scattered around its weedy yard. When I fired the engine up it vibrated so badly its outline blurred.
'No man!' the horrified mechanic said. ' This is very, very serious ... this car is very, very sick ... I think maybe only the dealers ... no ya, this car is very, very beyond us.'

The nearest big town was Port Elizabeth. A good friend of mine, Brian, lived there. We'd roomed together for a year in London, in Elephant And Castle. Now he taught architecture at PE university. By the time I got there the Uno had developed a ratcheting, clattering shriek. This noise hadn't been so bad on the open road, where the Uno could idle along at about ninety; but at lower speeds, pulling away from traffic lights, and almplified by the walls of buildings on either side, the sound was horrendous. Add to this my by now almost pathological avoidance of big cities, and the looks I was getting from pedestrians and drivers all around me, and I was in dire need of a stout by the time I arrived at a camping site situated on the beachfront at the far end of town.

This was one of the worse camping sites I'd seen so far. The toilets and showers were good, there was a nice pool to swim in and the beach was a stone's throw away through some thick scrub; but it was packed full of posh caravans, and there was no shade! In the camping sites I'd visited I'd always managed to find a spot that was relatively private, beneath a tree. Here I was stuck on a tiny patch of sandy grass between two hulking caravans, with no tree in sight.

I quickly erected the tent and took off with Spud and a quart concealed beneath my towel to the beach. A ledge of rock-pools extending for about a hundred metres into the sea extinguished any hopes of catching a wave, but I was able to dunk myself in one of the pools and scour off some of the road grime. By the time Brian arrived in his battered yellow Toyota I was sitting on the balcony of the camp pub, which provided a partial view of the sea over the scrub. Brian is about twenty nine. He has a wild bush of crizzy hair, which if allowed to grow develops into a great rounded afro. That had been back in his student days. He had it pared down now to manageable proportions, but it was still wild by normal standards. As he came up the wooden stairs beside the balcony he shot me a guarded look. If I didn't know him better I might have been offended. He has this way of looking around him warily as he walks, with his head slightly down and his slim shoulders hunched defensively, which can be misinterpreted. He'd been backpacking in Volvograd once when a drunken young Russian detached himself from the group he was with, walked over and punched Brian hard on the shoulder. Brian said it was because some Russians have a thing against foreigners. Personally I think it might have been caused by this look of alert, wary scepticism that he unconsciously gives the world. Then again, I've also seen him sauntering dreamily through dense London crowds, like he was alone on a beach, totally oblivious to the ripples he caused in the frenzied rythms of the pavement.

Brian bought a beer and joined me. By now it was past seven, and the pub-restuarant we were in was buzzing. Two attractive Australian girls were sitting with two Australian men - possibly their boyfriends, but not obviously so - just inside the doors leading from the balcony into the restuarant. Bryan and I were the only two out on the balcony. It was a warm, clear night. We could hear the sea murmuring just beyond the scrub covered dunes. The one Australian girl had bumped into Spud earlier, when I had been walking with him across to the camp's shower-rooms. She had come around a corner and seen him and yelled, 'Holy shit!' I'd quickly reassured her that he was harmless, but she hadn't looked entirely convinced.
She came out onto the balcony now, in woman's baggies that showed off most of her lovely brown thighs, and she was all over Spud. She sat at the wooden table beside ours and before long Spud was up on his hind legs, with his meaty chest on her lap. She was caressing and slapping his solid meat and saying, 'You're a strong boy, aren't you? Yes, you're just a big strong softie.'
Brian gave one of his nervous laughs and said, 'Be careful, that dog eats people!'
She laughed, appreciatively enough, since he was trying a bit of flirty banter, and went back to slapping and caressing Spud: 'You're such a big, strooong boy!' Slap. 'Yes you are! Yes you are!' Whack. It went on for about twenty minutes, while the three other Aussies sat inside and occasionally the curly headed blonde man who looked like he might be with her gave Brian and myself a cool look. Was she out here sitting with us to show him what a boring bastard he was? Was she waiting for Brian and I to invite her over? Who knows? We're not too adept at picking up on these signals. She eventually got up and said, "So long, fellas. Enjoy your night,' in a friendly enough way, and then she bent over and gave Spud a final rough, arousing caress - arousing enough for me, watching this - and a final whack on his chest. 'So long Spud. You're just a great big softie, aren't you?'

After this we drove through to the main PE beach strip, where we found a pub-restuarant that overlooked a peir. The rows of lights on either side of this pier made it look like a landing strip sretching into the sea. Further out, the festive lights of the ships looked like spaceships floating in dark air, waiting to land on this strip. I knew from this mental imagery that I was getting drunk. Spud meanwhile was having a ball. At the balcony pub he'd been sneaking into the resturarant and coming back with spare ribs and T-bones. Now he was doing the same. I don't think dogs were allowed in here, but Spud has a knack of blending in with the scenery. When we'd first walked in he'd stuck right beside my leg. He got a few glances, but after five minutes of sitting quietly at the foot of my barstool people had forgotten him. Then, quietly and unobstrusively, he ventured out amongst the tables. The people eating assumed that he belonged to someone on the staff, so they started feeding him. Before long Brian and I had waitress coming up to us with doggie bags that people had given them 'For the dog.' Every few minutes he came back to touch base at our barstools, and then he drifted off again. I was having a pee and he clicked up behind me, touched his cold nose against my calf for a second, and then clicked out again. There were three of us standing at the urinals and no-one batted an eyelid.

It was after twelve when we drove back along the dark, narrow road to my campsite at the far end of town. The Toyota's headlights on the beach scrub flickering past on either side made it seem like we were rushing down a tunnel. But when I looked over at the speedometer we were doing about forty. Brian was hunched over the wheel like an old lady, his nose almost touching it.
We'd made fervent, impassioned plans to spend the next few days together. He had to work in the morning, but in the afternoon he was attending the opening of a school he'd helped design and build in a local township. The plan was for me to hang around the camp in the morning, and then go with him to the opening. He also knew a mechanic I could take the ailing Uno to sometime.
But my God, when I woke up in the tent I felt terrible. The Castel draughts and tequila shots I'd drunk with Brian were enough to make me feel tender; but when you factored in the three quarts I'd drunk earlier in the day I was in dire straights. This would have been bearable though, if it wasn't for the fact that I had no shade. And when I stuck my grisly head out of the tent opening into blinding sunshine there, a few feet away, was a nice old couple in deckchairs. They looked up and smiled nervously from beneath a cool green awning that flared from the side of their giant caravan. I stumbled out and tried to organise myself while their sizzling skottel wafted queasy bacon smells at me. There was a radar dish planted beside their bronze Camry 4x4, and a tv droned dismally from somehwere in all their camping paraphernalia. On the other side of me, also a few feet away, another huge caravan rose to blot out the sky. The elderly couple tried not to look at me as I stumbled around in the white glare, putting water down for Spud, hanging clothes and towels from the Uno's open doors, but mostly just holding my head and groaning. Spud, who is normally very discreet about these things, chose this moment to deposit on the grass nearbye the terrible load of last night's bones. They came out slowly and painfully, in full view of this poor old couple, and of mostly everyone else in the camp. Everwhere I looked there were these great big immaculate caravans, and wondrously glossy LUV's, and awnings and tv's and skottels spluttering with eggs and bacon fat. Three well behaved, golden haired little girls trouped past my scarred beast of a shitting dog with their eyes averted. Then the grown up kids of the elderly couple arrived - two daughters, it seemed, with their husbands, and kids of their own. Within seconds I had this huge knot of happy, sociable people milling beside me. One of the husbands had been diving and had brought a bag of crayfish. It went into a boiling pot, the crayfish keening with what is apparently the sound of escaping air; to me it sounds like the agonised death throes of a living creature being boiled alive. Soon I had this smell to add to my nausea.

I tried lying in the tent, but it was an unbearable pink oven, much like the Uno, so I took Spud down to the sea for a swim. A glassy wind rippled the flat green water, and small scraps of cirrus flitted through a high, cold blue sky. The beach was empty, and paradoxically enough, now that I had my privacy, it felt lonely and depressing listening to the wind.

But back at the camp the crowd and the heat were worse than ever. The tall scrubby dune which denied us a view of the sea also blocked off the wind and seemed to trap a different sky above us to the one over the sea - a milky oppressive haze that pressed down on my crawling, sweating skin. I packed the tent into the Uno and sat groaning in the front seat. Spud lay on the passenger seat beside me and his eyes flicked at me unhappily, sensing my distress. The family cooking the crayfish were trying to do their thing, but I could see them looking across at me every now and then - a rather shady character, perhaps on a mad spin after a horrible divorce, but definately caravanless, 4x4less, skottelless; and very possibly alchoholic too, judging by the way I was holding my head, and by the amount of empty quart bottles I'd just noisily dumped in the yellow oil drum that we all shared.