Love and Fury

three

In January 1989 my savings ran out, so I registered with an employment agency. The man who took my details told me South Africans were popular. We were hard-working and self-reliant, he said. Not nannied by the state, like in Britain. I did not disagree with him. He whipped through the records and references I had given him. He was glad to see I had a first-class degree. He would send off my CV and samples of my writing to advertisers, publishers and magazines.

Sure enough, there was interest. An advertising agency or a publisher or a magazine - exactly which, I am no longer sure - shortlisted me for a position so junior there was nothing beneath it. The interview would be at the grand building on the Thames where the company had its offices.

I was ushered into the boardroom where two women in suits sat at an oval table. They had their backs to the window, so I could not read their faces, and they had my CV in front of them.

'You have a good turn of phrase,' one said, pointing a manicured finger at photocopies of my student articles. They asked me questions about the research I had done, the interviews, the writing. It was like an exam, and I thrived, drilled from childhood to debate my father, to hold my own, to listen and to respond to the facts. They seemed impressed. I was pleased. The one on the left made notes in the folder with my name on it. The one on the right leaned forward and said she'd been to Oxford and read the Romantics. 'What do you think of them?' she asked.

'I love "Daffodils" and "Westminster Bridge", but the "caverns measureless to man" is my favourite,' I said. 'I was studying Coleridge when I was arrested.'

'Arrested?' The notetaker riffled through my transcripts, as if looking for something she had missed. 'What for?'

Fool that I was, I rushed on, not for a moment thinking she might think I was a criminal. 'Protesting against the State of Emergency. You see, the police had the power to arrest anyone, to detain without trial. By that time thousands of people were in detention; I was nothing special.'

The interview woman put her pen down. I saw the ice in her eyes, but it was too late for me to stop.

'I was studying for my final exams when a friend came by and told me to come to campus with her. There's no arguing with Miriam, so I went. When we got there, we joined the others and faced off the riot police across the road. I remember the loudhailer: "You've got five minutes to disperse!" But we didn't move, cops surged towards us, and we ran. I turned and saw four coming at me, one pulling ahead of the others, and then I passed out. When I came round a cop was telling me to get up. But my legs didn't work, so he pulled me up and walked me as if I were his drunk girlfriend. Other students were being loaded into a van, but he put me into a car. I remember a policeman drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. They took me to the police station, and from there we were all taken to Pollsmoor.'

They both looked blank.

'That's the maximum-security prison where Mandela was taken after Robben Island.'

The two women exchanged glances. 'And what was it like in there?'

'A nightmare,' I said. 'The police shouted at us to get out. There were floodlights, six-metre walls with razor wire, guards with Alsatians straining at their leads. The prison services didn't know what to do with a bunch of white girls, but they soon figured this out. We were in solitary for a few days, and then all of us, twenty-one or more, were in a cell for eight people.'

'That's where you wrote your finals?' said the one with my transcripts.

'I did,' I said. 'There was such a fuss about us white students getting arrested that the Minister of the Interior granted us permission to write exams. Only three of us gave it a go, but at least we were given our books. The Romantics - the daffodils, and Blake's rose with the worm.'

The Oxford woman didn't smile.

'So, you don't have a criminal record?'

'No,' I said. 'They charged us with crazy things, but the judge dismissed these.'

The way they looked at me, they would never call me back, I knew that, but we said goodbye as if they might.

Out on the street, fighting its tide of rushing people, buffeted by passers-by, I burned with shame. Thousands were in detention and the police were shooting people in the townships every day. There was no heroism in an accidental arrest. I had made a story of it, but had been unable to convey to the two women, shoulder pads as crisp as if they were soldiers in a firing squad, the terror I'd felt as the door of the cell slammed shut. The sound a bullet in my back. My cell was two paces long, its width that of my outstretched arms. My trousers sagged, the belt taken so I would not be able to hang myself.

This was not something I had considered before, but the thought of suicide, now that it was there, was alluring - a silver flash, a fish diving for freedom in dark water.

Feeling insubstantial, I turned down another busy road. I understood that the law, and what is right, are two separate things. I had been shaped by a place where they were in opposition to each other. Unlike those two women, I thought. By then I did not know where I was and I was desperate to get home, but when I tried to read the street signs the letters jumbled, and I could not decipher the names of any of the streets. I pulled my coat closer as I hurried down another street I did not recognise.

My cell had been colder than this, and empty apart from a bulb behind a metal grille, a toilet without a lid, and a bed with a folded grey blanket on it. I had wrapped the blanket around my shoulders. It released the smell of the woman who had been there before me. I lay on her bed and closed my eyes, but it had been impossible to sleep.

A bag arrived with my name on it in Miriam's handwriting. I hugged it close as if it were my friend herself. Inside was a pair of new sheepskin slippers, a size too big but so soft, and a froth of white lace. A party dress for a party girl. I put it on and, Madonna's 'Like a Virgin' playing in my head, pirouetted. There was also soap, face cream, shampoo, tampons and lipstick. I didn't have a mirror in my cell, but I applied the red lipstick, and, for a moment, felt defiant. I dropped to the floor and tried to do push-ups the way real political prisoners did, but my arms, not seeing the sense of what I was making them do, refused to lift me.

I made a jaunty tale of those failed exercises and of the whack-whack-whack of our guard-invigilator's rifle butt on the desks when we wrote exams. That was at the party friends had organised to celebrate my release - beers, hugs, cigarettes, compliments on how great I looked, on how thin I was. 'I couldn't eat,' I said with a laugh. 'I threw everything up.'

'It makes a good story, doesn't it, Margs?' said a friend, the expression in his eyes speculative - or bored. That shut me up. I did not know how else to make sense of what had happened, except by fashioning my terror and fury into a tale. Fortunately, there was dancing and I could escape with the The Clash thrashing out 'London's Calling'.

Everything was over as if it had never happened. Except it had not been a jaunt and it wasn't over. The girl who went through those prison gates was different to the woman who came out, and I did not always recognise her.

The doctor who checked my pulse and blood pressure said I was in perfect physical nick, but was I coping mentally? He was the only person who asked that question. I wanted to fling myself into his arms and tell him how I struggled with time, with making it pass. Tell him it was as if I was caught in invisible quicksand. That ever since those two security policemen had interrogated me, one standing so close that I could feel his hot breath on my neck, I'd had nightmares in which men, grim-faced and skeletal as Giacometti sculptures, chased me - so I did not, could not, sleep, and I was so tired I thought I would go insane. I opened my mouth to say this, but all that came out was, 'I'm fine.'

I could not speak to this worried-looking man. His niece had been in solitary confinement for months. We prisoners had talked to her when filing past her window on our way to the exercise yard, but the wardens told us that was forbidden. The next day we sang to her, our voices soaring above the concrete walls. When we went past the next day, workmen were welding a metal sheet over her window. Because of our singing, she was immured in darkness. So what could I possibly have to complain about mentally?

Afterwards, whenever our digs were empty, I'd lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. When my last exam came round I intended to get up, get to work, but instead I watched motes of dust glide up and down the afternoon rays that shone through a slit in the curtains. Which I was doing when a motorbike pulled up outside. I opened the front door, and a friend was standing there with a helmet in his hands. He held it out to me and said, 'I've come to take you for a...