Waiting for a better tomorrow that never comes
IS RING catches the light and blinds you to him for a moment. He’s tilting a Bakers luxury assortment box, folded flat, up to his face. He licks the cardboard, his tongue moving slowly from side to side, then brings his nose right up against it and draws a breath. His eyes are open all the time, focused only on what’s in front of him.
He drags his nose over the box, then throws it down and disappears behind the concrete wall like a jack-in-the-box. You can see the top of his head, and soon that also vanishes. Then, it is as if he was never there at all.
But there are others, and you can see them up there and down here, occasional bodies in the gloom. You can hear them. They live there, in the railway station that was never really a railway station at the junction of Carr and Gerard Sekoto in Newtown.
There’s a bad-tempered echo in the dank coolness through the pillars.
HOne man is undressing, taking off his belt with a clatter, then his trousers which fall quietly to the ground. He lifts his T-shirt over his head. He’s in the shadow of a concrete block, with his back to the parking lot, but the light of the afternoon falls on to his spine. It’s like a thick, short line of rope.
He doesn’t turn around, just bends down to dig around in a big chequered bag for a long time.
There’s the snap, crash and tinkling of glass breaking. A woman sitting on the floor holding her knees shifts to the right to peer at something she thinks she sees, but quickly loses interest and lowers her face on to her chest.
She’s small and lonely, the spikes of old dreadlocks sticking up like crooked fingers around her head.
The surrounding fence has long been flattened so that people who need to hide can get in here. But it may soon be the end of their refuge as Transnet says it finally intends turning this relic of the old ZAR government into museum.
A curiosity as you drive over Nelson Mandela Bridge, it has long left us wondering at its oddness, abandoned like an unfinished dream in the middle of the veld. The original Joburg station, this heritage spot has waited to become something for nearly 20 years – still and untouched even as the city has changed around it so many times.
It feels as if pink Victorian men in curly moustaches and white waistcoats might have ordered slaves to drag it there.
Enormous, its second-storey windows cut the blue sky into squares, the curlicues of its ironwork curving elegantly against the steel struts. You can imagine soft coils of steam rising up to the roof from a shining train puffing between the pillars. You get a picture of fragrant ladies with parasols and hooped skirts tripping lightly on to a platform.
But there’s nothing there except a dark cave, every corner piled with someone’s things, crevices stuffed with the souvenirs of the street. Life goes on outside the tired old station.
The parking lot, which the Market Theatre uses at night, is a driving school in the day, the ground marked out with poles for practices. There’s the Cheapest and the Vhavenda. There’s the Last Time and Better Next Time.
Reticulated trucks reverse hesitantly up and down a ramp while pupils with round eyes lean nervously out of the driver’s side to check their route. The instructors smoke in a huddle, the accoutrements of petty crime littered at their feet. Broken cellphones. Spark plugs. A stray screwdriver.
Cranes are swinging above their heads, the station surrounded by the city’s valiant reconstruction. But the people inside the station don’t seem to notice. Perhaps they lost interest a long time ago.