for him, not if it came to him keeping his appointment.
Sergeant Oosthuizen was the prison officer who had responsibility most days for Jeez. Most days Sergeant Oosthuizen escorted Jeez to the exercise yard.
Each time he heard the slam of the door that separated the main C section corridor from the C section 2 corridor, and each time he heard the key slot into his cell door he hoped, a short soaring hope, that the governor was coming with the message that would tell Jeez that the team had not abandoned him.
They always slammed the door between the main corridor and C section 2.
The team had been his life. The team was names and faces, clear as photographs, no blurring with time. The captain of the team was Colonel Basil, big and bluff and with thin blue veins surfacing on apple red cheeks. The men in the team were Lennie who had a patter of whip crack jokes, and Adrian who flirted with the fresh new recruits, and Henry who on a Friday evening at the end of the working office week played the piano in the saloon bar of the pub that the Century men used. Colonel Basil and Lennie and Adrian and Henry were his team and his life.
He hadn't let them down, neither a long time ago nor in Johannesburg. Of course they'd be working for him, moving bloody mountains for him. Probably old Colonel Basil would have set up a special task force desk to supervise the prising of Jeez out of the hole he was in.
Sergeant Oosthuizen was smiling at him from the opened cell door. They were cutting it rather fine. Hell of a good lime he'd had on the team, the real friendships, home and away. Being on the team mattered, because membership of the team was the guarantee. Shit, the guarantee was important to a leg man. It said that the team would never stop working their balls off for a leg man who was in trouble.
And Christ, was he in trouble. Jeez Carew, member of the team, was going to hang. And his faith in the team was slipping.
'Nice morning for a walk. Come on, Carew.'
The solicitor had driven that morning from Johannesburg because it was useless to telephone for information, and worse than useless to write letters to the Justice Ministry.
He was not shown in to the civil servant's office until after the lunch hour.
It was a brittle meeting. The elderly Afrikaner South African and the young English heritage South African. The man on government pay and the man on private practice.
The solicitor's questions were blunt enough.
Had the decision been taken by the State President on whether James Carew would hang?
The civil servant had parried. 'The decision has been taken, but the decision is not yet public.'
Could the solicitor's client know of the decision of the State President?
'He'll know when he needs to know.'
Surely, if he was going to get clemency then he should be told immediately?
'If he's not going to get clemency then he's better not knowing.'
Couldn't the solicitor be given an indication of the State President's thinking?
'Look, I'm not going to tell you what is the State President's opinion. The way we do it is this, the deputy sheriff will go to the gaol not more than four or five days before an execution and he will then inform a prisoner that the appeal to the State President has been turned down. I'm not saying for certain that the sentence will stand in the case of your client, but I can tell you that if it does stand you will know at the same time that Carew knows.'
It had been spelled out to him. The young solicitor softened.
'Not for Carew, but for me to know.'
'You're asking me to read the mind of the State President.'
'A bit of guidance.'
'The minister was in Petrusburg this morning. He made an addition to his prepared speech. He said… 'There are people who say that your government is soft on the matter of law and order. We are not. There are people who say that our legal processes can be influenced by the threats of foreign governments. They can not. There are people who say that terrorists will get away with murder in our fine country.
They will not. I warn people who seek to bring down our society that they will face the harshest penalties under our law, whether they be White or Black, whether they be our citizens or jackals from outside.'… It's not me that's answering your questions, it is my minister.'
'How long?'
'Not long, not a month.'
'It's cut and dried?'
'Listen. At the moment we have a police strength of around 45,000. In ten years we will have a force of more than 80,000. Right now we have to fight this unrest with an understrength force. If any South African police line cracks then there is nothing to save us from anarchy. We have to sustain the morale of the police or we go under, and supporting the morale is not best served by reprieving police murderers.'
'I appreciate that you've spoken to me in confidence.
What can save my client?'
The civil servant examined the file in front of him. He was a long time turning the pages. He looked up, he gazed steadily at the solicitor.
'If at this late stage your client were to give to the security police every detail of his knowledge of the African National Congress, then there might be grounds for clemency in his case alone.'
'The others would go?'
'We could handle one reprieve, not more. We have never understood why your client ever involved himself in terrorism, and he hasn't helped us. If we had names, safe houses, arms caches, everything he knew, then we could talk about clemency.'
'Guaranteed?'
Fractionally the eyebrows of the civil servant lifted.
'You should tell him to talk to the security police, that's all that can save him.'
•* •
Sergeant Oosthuizen stood by the locked door of the exercise yard and talked. He talked of his daughter who was big in wind-surfing down on the Cape, and of his son who owned a liquor store in Louis Trichardt.
Sergeant Oosthuizen had been 38 years in the prison service, the last eleven of them in Beverly Hills. He was to retire in the next month, and then he'd be able to spend time with his daughter and his son. Sergeant Oosthuizen didn't require Jeez to have a conversation with him. He just talked, that was what he was happiest at.
It was more of a garden than an exercise yard. Against the walls was concrete paving. Each wall was nine paces long.
Thirty-six paces for a circuit. Forty-nine circuits was a mile's walk. The centre of the yard was Jeez's garden. The soil was twelve inches deep, then concrete. It was Jeez's garden because none of the other condemns showed any interest in it. The garden had not been looked after since a child killer had gone to the rope the month before Jeez arrived at Beverly Hills. Last spring Oosthuizen had brought Jeez seed. The geraniums had done well, the marigolds had threatened to take over, the chrysanthemums had failed. Jeez crouched on his haunches and picked discoloured leaves and old blooms off the geraniums. The sunlight was latticed over the bed and the concrete by the shadow of the grid above him. The garden was a cell. The song birds could manage it through the grid and out again, but nothing as large as a pigeon could have squeezed down to feed from the grubs that he turned up when he weeded his flowers.
In the exercise yard Jeez could see the sky and he could feel a trapped slow breath of wind, but he could see no trees, and no buildings, and no men other than Sergeant Oosthuizan and sometimes the guard at his catwalk window.
He could see the wall of C section 2, and the outer wall, and the wall of C section 3, and the wall of the C section corridor.
If he stod with his back to the wall of C section 2 and raised himself onto tip-toe he could look over the roof of C section
amp; onto the upper brickwork of the hanging room.
