then he killed himself. He can't tell them my name, or any name, or what was the target. That's a hell of a debt to be paid off. I can't walk away, not from them, and not from my father.'
'On your own you won't even get to see the gaol.'
'Then in Beverly Hills they'll all hear the gunfire. The plans told me that they'll hear it. They have high windows into the catwalks, and up in the catwalk space there are more windows that look down into the cells. Those windows are always open. My father will hear the gunfire. Everyone in that bastard place will know that someone came, someone tried.'
She couldn't look at him. She didn't dare to see his face.
'It's madness.'
'If I walked away I'd have to live with next Thursday morning. I could be back in London. I could be sitting and filling my gut with booze, and I could take all the tablets that get you to sleep. Wouldn't matter. I'd be in that cell, wondering whether he was scared, what he was thinking.
I'd hear them come for him. I'd see them walk him along the corridors. What do you want me to bloody well do, Ros, go to sleep, set the alarm for five in the morning, wake up to know that my father's being pitched off a trap? What do I do then? Turn over and go back to sleep?'
Jan had leaned forward. Pushing his head between the high seat backs.
'It's to break out one person?'
Jack said, 'Yes.'
'It is to save one of them?'
'Yes.'
'There are five that are going to hang.'
'The one is my father.'
'And you don't give a shit for the other four?'
Jack dropped his head. 'Jan, believe me, I'm not interested in five, I'm going to break out one.'
'He's like every other White,' Jan shouted. 'He's a racist.'
Ros snapped, 'Grow up, for Christ's sake, he doesn't give a fuck for your grubby little Movement.'
'To leave four Blacks to hang, and to try to save one White, that's racism.'
'They're killers, those four murdering swine.'
'You're a racist, too, Ros.'
They were both yelling. Jack's hands went up, palms open, on either side of his head.
'I'm not proud of what I've decided but it's my decision, alone.'
'It's all horseshit about you being alone,' Jan said.
'If you were alone you wouldn't be in my bloody car,'
Ros said.
Jack leaned across and kissed her on the cheek, and she didn't pull away. He took Jan's hand and shook it fervently.
Christ, what a bloody awful army.
Ros said she was going to Hillbrow. She said there was a studio flat there that belonged to a friend from school. Her friend always gave her the keys when she took her small son back to Durban and her parents. Ros said that there wasn't a husband, nor a live-in man. Ros said that her friend liked to know that someone came to keep an eye on the flat when she was away. Ros said that Hillbrow was the home of the drifters in Johannesburg, where Blacks and Asians and Coloureds and Whites lived alongside each other in tower blocks without being constantly harrassed by the police for violating the residential codes. Ros said he wouldn't be noticed in Hillbrow.
It was dark when they reached Johannesburg.
And he needed to think, because the days were slipping away, Thursday was rushing to him.
The studio flat, fifth floor, was an untidy mess.
They'd come in the back way. The car parked at the rear, so that they could all climb the five flights of the concrete steps of the fire escape. Heavy going for Jan, and Ros and Jack had their hands full. Ros had the key, took a bit of finding in her handbag.
Just one dismal room for living. All there. Bed, cooker, shelves, cupboards, prints on the wall of views of the English Lakes.
He went to the one window. He reckoned he was less than a mile from the Landdrost, but this was a different world.
A crowded pavement below him. He could see Blacks and Whites strolling, and there was a cafe opposite with chairs and tables in the open where he could see the colour mix.
Music from radio stations and records merged, deafening, from the street, from alongside, from above. A prefabricated block, and he thought he heard the bed springs going upstairs and he didn't like to look at Ros. A fight below, same side of the street as the block, and he had to crane to see two guys, White, kicking hell out of a third guy, White, and a girl watching, Black or Coloured or some mix. People walking round them, letting them get on with it.
Jan told him that they had to go home, Ros nodding. Jack understood the risks they took. He had the airport, they had nowhere to run for. Ros had her mouth clenched as Jan said that he would ring at eight and at ten and at midnight. Jack should let the phone ring, but not pick it up. If there were a trace on their home telephone then it would only operate when the phone was lifted at the receiver's end. The ringing phone would tell Jack that all was well with Jan and Ros
… Jack didn't ask what he should do if the phone didn't ring. It was for Jack Curwen to make decisions, not to ask what he should do. His responsibility, all on his shoulders.
Jan said he would come back to the flat in the morning. Ros didn't say when she might see him again. He thought he was alone because he could not imagine how a crippled student and an insurance office desk worker could help him work the break out from the maximum security cells of Beverly Hills. Hard put to see how he could help himself.
He hadn't eaten since breakfast.
He looked in the fridge. There was yoghurt, and some cream cheese, and the remains of a bowl of salad, and some salami slices. He reckoned the girl who lived in the studio flat must be a virtual skeleton. He cleaned out the fridge.
He quartered the large room. It was a compulsion, to see how the single parent lived, what she read, what she wore.
He couldn't have answered for this violation of her privacy other than by saying it was a symptom of his aloneness.
He found the building bricks.
They were the same as he had had when he was a kid.
They were the same as Will had back at Churchill Close.
Lego bricks, product of Denmark, there was a bread bin of them.
Jack sat on the floor and laid out his plans of Beverly Hills, and built the gaol in plastic bricks of blue and red and yellow and white. He built technicolor perimeter walls.
He made C section from red bricks, and administration in yellow, and A and B sections in white. He made the exercise yard of C section 2 in blue. He made a watchtower behind the gallows block, and he built towers where the flood light stanchions were set.
He was a child at play.
There were no roofs for his buildings. He could look down into each cubicle he made, into the cells, into the corridors, into the exercise yards. He put a door between C section's corridor and C section 2's corridor. He put a door on a cell.
He could count the number of the doors, he could count the number of the walls.
With the bricks that remained he located Pretoria Local and Pretoria Central and the White Politicals and the Women's. He scattered the prison staff homes, and the self service store, and the recreation and swimming areas, all on the north slope below Beverly Hills. Level with the gaol, on the west side, he put the Commissioner of Prison's residence.
He laid out a sheet of paper for the rifle range on the east side. He made a broken line with the last of the bricks to make the outer ring of wire fences on Magazine Hill to the south.
