It was a Christmas night. At 11pm Rockey Street
bustled with activity. Glittering neon lights adorned the streets, decorating
the night in warm celebratory breaths. Hordes
of people swarmed the streets; traffic thick in the thick of the night. I could
see it, and I could tell that tonight had little to do with the celebration of
the birth of the Son of God than it had with accelerated consumerism and a
transitory joie de vivre. The streets were colourful and jubilant. I now knew
why they called this part of the city ‘rainbow suburb of Jozi’. Though I was
relatively a new comer in Yeoville, I tried in every way possible to blend in. I
didn’t want any of my past skeletons to resurface and catch up with me. No one
in Durban knew of my new abode. Like ephemeral smoke, I had vanished into thin
air, without telling anyone where I was going. Besides, I was a lone ranger
there. No family. No real friends.
In Westville, just a few kilometres from inner-city
Durban, I was known for bad things. Although I had over the year eluded
incarceration, I had always been on the run, being a suspect for numerous
criminal activities. I didn’t belong to any gang. I trusted no one but myself. I
despised working in groups. That is why even at school I had preferred games
like chess over football. No one had to blame anyone for their downfall. For
nearly five years I robbed banks, broke into huge stores, and hijacked sleek
government vehicles. My target was the government and capitalist organisations.
I never stole from the common man. I never raped or harmed individuals in the
streets. I was a man on a mission – caring thug.
One night in Durban I broke into a government
revenue office. I went there with a humanitarian objective of returning the taxpayers
money back to the people. Unfortunately,
things went wrong and I had to shoot and kill three security guards. The police
responded promptly to the triggered alarm system. I knew they would be heavily
armed and well resourced. Trying any escape manoeuvres was tantamount to
suicide. When they arrived, my VW City
Golf was parked in front of the building, with a box of ammunition on the back
seat and my wallet on the glove compartment. After searching the entire
building and the streets, it was decided that I had escaped on foot.
After a week of
living in the confined darkness between the ceiling and the roof of the revenue
office building, I crawled out through a gap I had split between the joints of
the roof sheets. My skin itched from fibreglass insulation in the ceiling. My
throat was dry from thirst and lack of clean air. When my feet touched the
streets of Durban, I decided that it was for the last time. I had to move away;
to get a new life somewhere.
I chose Yeoville primarily because the name rhymed
with what I had considered home, Westville. There are several other names of
course - Troyeville, Melville, Pimville and Dobsonvile. But there was something
about Yeoville that pulled me to the place. Scientists call it ecdysis when
snakes shed their skin and move on. And like a snake that had just sloughed its
skin, I left Westville seeking further growth and to get rid of the parasites
that had clung to my old skin. In this huge cosmopolitan metropolis called
Johannesburg, I found home and hope in Yeoville.
As I walked along the glittering Rocky Street on a
Christmas night, I whistled along with the reggae tunes that permeated the air
from the House of Tandoor. Ahead, two huge Christmas monuments, the Hillbrow
tower and the Ponte building, threw glimmers into the black sky, enhancing
further the festive mood. I walked on without any destination in mind, enjoying
the night breeze and celebrating my new ‘born-again’ life. I turned into a
street darker and more silent. Lost in my own thoughts, I took another turn
into a passage between residential flats, thinking about me, for I only had
myself and no one else to think of.
Something smashed through a window, disrupting my
thoughts and the crisp silence of the night. Glass fragments showered down onto
the pavement like ice rain, followed immediately by a thud of something hitting
the ground in front of me. Splinters of broken glass glimmered under a fading
street lamp. And there was something else – an object wrapped in cloth. I
looked up at the tall building. A jagged gap on a window yawned down at me,
revealing a dark interior about five levels up. I looked up and down the narrow
path between buildings. No one. I glanced up at the broken window, silence and
darkness. Did someone not just throw an object through a closed window?
(to be continued)
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