The Pickup Read Free

terrace. This time went inside, this time he was taken to the friends’ table.
    Hi Julie;
a rearrangement of chairs. —This is Abdu, he’s going to find new wheels for me.—
    Hi Abdu.
(Sounds to them like an abbreviation of Abdurahman, familiar among names of Malays in Cape Town.) The friends have no delicacy about asking who you are, where you come from—that’s just the reverse side of bourgeois xenophobia. No, not the Cape. They have his story out of him in no time at all, they interject, play upon it with examples they know of, advice they have to offer, interest that is innocently generous or unwelcome, depends which way the man might take it—but at once, he’s not a ‘garage man’ he’s a friend, one of them, their horizon is broadening all the time.
    So that’s where he’s from; one of them knows all about that benighted country. The ‘garage man’ has a university degree in economics there (the university is one nobody’s heard of) but there isn’t a hope in hell (and that place
is
a hell that, because of god knows what, probably the religious and political factions he did or did not belong to, or lack of money to pay bribes to the right people) he could get an academic appointment. Or a job of any kind, maybe; no work, no development, what can you grow in a desert, corrupt government, religious oppression, cross-border conflict—composite, if inaccurate, of all they think they know about the region,
they’re
telling
him
about his country. But then she hears anexplanation for something he had said to her she hadn’t understood. He’s telling them: —I can’t say that—‘my country’—because somebody else made a line and said that is it. In my father’s time they gave it to the rich who run it for themselves. So whose country I should say, it’s mine.—
    With them, his English is adequate enough and they have not been embarrassed to ask from what mother tongue his accent and locutions come. One of them enquires hopefully of this foreignness, since she has adopted the faith that is a way of life, not a bellicose ethnicity. —Are you a Buddhist?—
    â€”No I am not that.—
    And again, he has risen, he has to leave them, he’s a mechanic, he belongs to the manual world of work. One of them ponders, breaking a match over and over. —An economist having to become a grease-monkey. I wonder how he learned that stuff with cars.—
    Another had the answer.
    â€”Needs must. The only way to get into countries that don’t want you is as manual labourer or Mafia.—
    A week went by. She would never see him again. It happened, among the friends, with the people they picked up: —Where’s that girl you brought along, the one who said she’d been a speech-writer for some cabinet minister who was sacked?— —Oh she seems to have left town.— —And the other guy—interesting—he wanted to organize street kids as buskers, playing steel drums outside cinemas, did he ever get that off the ground?— —No idea where he landed up.—
    Two weeks. Of course the man from the garage knew where to find her. He approached the friends’ table on a Saturday morning to tell her he had found a car for her. The garage workshop was closed on Saturdays and now he was wearing well-ironed black jeans, a rose-coloured shirt with a paisley scarf at the neck. They insisted he must have coffee; it was someone’s birthday and the occasion quickly turned thecoffee to red wine. He didn’t drink alcohol; he looked at her lifting her glass: I’ve brought the car for you to drive.
    And the friends, who were ready to laugh at anything, in their mood, did so clownishly—O-HO-HOHOHO!—assuring him, —Julie has a strong head, not to worry!— But she refused a second glass.
    â€”The cops are out with their breathalysers, it’s the