Henk Rossouw has written narrative nonfiction for the Sunday Independent and the Mail & Guardian. His focus is on the stories of the marginalised, of exiles, and of survivors. He lives in Cape Town.

Sleeping on Long Street

“Can you go home?”
     “My mother,” said Samuel Hendricks, between mouthfuls, “will kill me.”
     He carried on eating, my question dismissed. His mother lived in a concrete tenement in Blackheath, a township past the airport. On the plastic chair next to him, inside the Fontana Roastery, sat Ashraf Ely, watching my face while sipping his Coke.
     “Home?” he said, “there’s never anything to eat at home.”
     In South Africa, sleep doesn’t come easily when you own a double bed. You want a comfortable reason why two street kids, fourteen years old, sleep outside on Long Street, cheeks on the pavement. Eager for this sedative, I’d invited Ashraf and Samuel to a fast-food restaurant for a cheap R14 meal, chicken ’n chips.
     Bellies full, I assumed their trust. Ashraf, more wary, had asked Samuel to answer first. Now he looked at me, hard, leaning back in his chair, the promise of easy sleep slipping away.
     “My step-father beat me too much,” said Ashraf.
     The same kid who can drive a stick shift and hustle twenty rand from a German tourist in five seconds flat, played with his food, drawing patterns in his plate of chicken grease with a dirty finger.
     “My mother tried to cover me up,” he said. “But he just hit her. You see, it’s always the father. Even if it isn’t you must say it is — without your mother you wouldn’t be alive.”
     Samuel was quiet. Since he was seven his mother beat him with a shoe, a belt, sometimes a pipe. I ordered Cokes and more chips.
     Both kids came from the Cape Flats, the vast stretch of white sand where their family was re-settled after forced removals. Before they were born, the Group Areas Act had pushed their parents into rudimentary housing, and dispersed their grandparents, aunts, uncles, anyone who’d lived in the same neighbourhood.
     So when the nuclear family split into domestic violence there was no extended family to cushion the blows. Samuel’s unemployed mother unstrapped her belt when his father vanished. Ashraf’s occasional father was replaced by a step-father with a mean right.
     “I left,” said Ashraf. “No one asked me to go.”
     No one would ask. In this country fists are clearer than words.
     Ashraf and Samuel gravitated to the ‘Mother City’ — the nickname for Cape Town vaunted in the tourist guides — teaming up four years ago. They had foraged in bins, at first, before they got better at aanklop — street slang for begging. Any handouts — cash, fast food, old clothes — they have shared. In the tarmac arms of the street Ashraf and Samuel are family.
     We pushed our plates aside and moved closer to the TV. Channel O was on and Ashraf and Samuel sang the lyrics to the hip-hop videos. Men wearing baseball caps and Nikes came into Fontana. As their talk drifted over to us Samuel tapped my arm.
     He wanted to know if I knew this Afrikaans word they used. Kanala. “It means thanks,” he said. “But they didn’t teach us that Afrikaans in school.”
     “Would you go back to school if they did?” I asked. Back on the Flats, squeezing into the sardine can left over from the pre-election Dept of Education and Culture was called ‘school’.
     “We still go to school,” said Ashraf. His teacher at Learn to Live, a school in Greenpoint bridging the street and formal education, lets him do the science experiments in class. “I get up early every morning,” said Ashraf, solemnly. “I want to be a scientist.”
     “Isn’t it far to walk?” I asked, smiling. A streetwise Einstein.
     “Street life’s about walking,” quipped Ashraf.
     “Yah, they call us strollers,” said Samuel. “If we’re lying on the street no-one can tell us ‘Hey you! Get up!’ “
     You! Up! To Samuel and Ashraf the grammar of adults is only in the imperative form. Adults control punishment and affection. When adults failed them, Samuel and Ashraf chose the status of adults for themselves, on the street. They believe they are free.
     It’s a brittle freedom, though. Survival still depends on gaining the sympathy of adults. I have seen Ashraf walk up smoothly to a passing stranger, take his hand, let loose a sob story, and pocket twenty rand, enough for a burger and two hours of video games. Survival means he must auction his biography.
     Going, going, gone. I got up to pay the bill.
     It was night. Outside in the vapid glow from bars and neonlights, I followed Samuel and Ashraf up the street to their doorway for the night, in front of the Salon Capri, a barbershop. There was vomit in their usual doorway, next to the street café called Lola’s.
     “Knock before you come in,” said Ashraf, lying on the pavement, looking up at the stars. Samuel and I sat down, backs against the cold glass.
     There were street shelters in Cape Town, Green Point and Woodstock, all within walking distance. I wanted to know why they didn’t want to sleep in a bed, for free.
     “They make a girl of you there,” said Samuel, slipping into Afrikaans. I knew and I didn’t know. This admission wasn’t part of the bargain.
     Ashraf, who wants to be a scientist, was more precise: “They sodomise us,” he said, voice dry. “You wake up in the middle of the night and feel them pulling off your pants. It’s safer on the street.”
     ’They’ were the older kids, eighteen, nineteen, crammed in the same shelter with children as young as six. When I asked why there wasn’t a separate shelter Ashraf curled his lip and rubbed his fingers together — no funds.
     “Mbeki,” he spat out, “keeps all the money for himself.”
     Ashraf and Samuel were restless, but tired of talking. They walked over to Games Corner, the video game mecca of Long Street. It was 1am, and the doors were still open. While they bought game tokens with my small change I made up a list.
     A pair of shoes for Ashraf. “Size six,” he said, counting his tokens. Samuel wanted pants. They slotted tokens into a pair of plastic motorbikes, and I left for my double bed, sleepy.
     Game over.

A few nights later I found them on the corner of Long and Buiten. Samuel sat in an old tyre, and Ashraf on the pavement, smoking. The night was warm, and we talked idly.
     It was quiet, but they kept watch on the street from the corner of their eyes. A Casspir — the armoured vehicle used by the apartheid military to stifle protests in the townships — painted now in police colours, blue and white, kept cruising past, circling the block.
     Suddenly, the Casspir braked, a hundred yards up. We heard screams. Ashraf and Samuel jerked to their feet. I thought they were about to run — but they sauntered closer and closer, like moths drawn to the swirling blue light on its steel roof.
     In the lee of the Casspir a circle of cops were kicking a West African in a white T-shirt. When they couldn’t find the coke in his pockets and shoes, one cop swung down his huge flashlight onto the man’s back. Once, twice. He screeched, immigrant words — French, maybe Yoruba — scraping from his throat.
     “Lift up your tongue!”
     The cops pulled him up and shoved the light in his mouth. Ashraf and Samuel watched, in silence, until a white vagrant, nervous, new on the street, emerged from a doorway.
     “Disperse!” he yelled. “If this was the old days you’d have to move. Now!” The way he said it I knew he was ex-SADF, and his ‘old days’ were when you could fire teargas into a crowd of three. Ashraf and Samuel said nothing, eyes looking through him.
     “You shouldn’t have to see this,” said the vagrant, his voice softer, as if he’d suddenly realised he was shouting at kids.
     Ashraf looked him in the eyes for a beat, his face tight, then curled his fingers into a pistol and jerked it at the police.
     “I’ve seen them shoot someone in the head,” he said, “On this street. I’ve seen girls get raped here, and beaten up, I’ve seen -”
     He broke off. “Just don’t you tell me,” he whispered fiercely, “What I can see and what I can’t see.”
     The vagrant slowly moved aside, but the West African was shut in the Casspir. A cop took a step towards us and Ashraf turned away. We followed him in silence to the Fontana Roastery.

We had a rendevous for Sunday afternoon. My car brakes gave up the ghost and I didn’t make it. When I came the next night Samuel and Ashraf weren’t there, nor the next night. Up and down Long Street I walked but they weren’t outside Lola’s or the Salon Capri. Fontana was empty.
     I asked around inside Games Corner. A kid with a budding moustache overheard me and drew me aside. Ashraf had vanished into Mitchell’s Plain, maybe to his mother’s house.
     “They won’t find him there,” said the kid with the moustache.
     “The police?” I guessed.
     The kid nodded. “Ashraf’s got lots of cases out on him.”
     From an immigrant security guard I found out that there was a burglary on Sunday night at The Yard, a bar on Long Street. The owner — Coetzee — was a big Afrikaner, easy to talk to over a beer, and loose with his side of the story.
     After waiting the afternoon for me to pitch, Ashraf and Samuel broke into The Yard, with two accomplices. The next morning Coetzee had found Andrew and Hendry asleep in vomit on the opposite pavement. An empty bottle of whisky was at their feet, in their hands were packets of biltong from the bar.
     When the cops arrived Andrew, hardly eleven, blurted out the names of Ashraf Ely and Samuel Hendricks. They had broken in through a side alley, taken bottles of spirits, bent the steak knives and tore the safe off from the wall for the three hundred rand inside.
     The police would do nothing, Coetzee told me, fists on the bar. The kids were too young. Then the phone rang and Coetzee picked up. He muffled the reciever with a sweaty palm as I left.
     “But I know Ashraf,” he said. “I’m gonna deal with him later.”
     I wanted to find Ashraf before Coetzee did. Meals at Fontana add up, and I’d already paid for the size six shoes. I wanted return on my investment — food in exchange for confession.
     From a payphone I called up Mr Brown, principal of Learn to Live, Ashraf’s school at the Salesian Institute, hoping for the address of his mother in Mitchell’s Plain.
     “Ashraf?” said Mr Brown. His voice was warm, and measured. “I’m afraid there’s no Ashraf here. You sure it’s his real name?”
     I didn’t know. Mr Brown asked me to wait. He tapped at his keyboard but could find no record of an ‘Ashraf’, and there were three different ‘Samuel’s on file, none of them Hendricks.
     Then Mr Brown got up and opened the files from the year before. “Yes,” he said finally, “Ashraf Ely. He was last here last year May — for five days.”
     Not even a week. The science teacher didn’t exist. Fourteen years old, Mr Brown told me, was more than likely a brave lie.
     Standing in the payphone cubicle, I saw Ashraf at the table in Fontana urging me to keep up, as if somehow my notes could pin his story down. Mr Brown said that after a year of bartering their stories, the kids don’t know anymore how much they say is true.
     I hung up.
     Ashraf and Samuel had wanted to tuck me into bed with their stories, to give me my sleep. A malleable biography is a commodity on the street and obeying the needs of their client, they had sold me what I wanted to hear: Ashraf Ely, future BSc, oneday owner of a double bed.
     Yet the truth is only pushed out of shape, not hidden. I remember when Samuel had wanted the pair of pants in Games Corner. I’d asked to see his label, to note the right size, and — stupidly — I touched his waistband as he turned it over.
     He flinched. He jerked his eyes up at me. Just for a second, as panic clouded his face, he did not recognise me. Then calm.
     That look he gave me was plain. Whether the sexual violence happened at home in Blackheath, in the Homestead, on Long Street, I can’t say. There are no certain facts. But to finish my story I had no choice but to trust the facts the way the kids told it — the way I’m telling you.
     One month later I found Samuel and Ashraf squatting on the Green St pavement, an alley off Long. Ashraf was very withdrawn, his face was swollen. Coetzee’s fists had found him. I sat down, wanting to talk.
     “You always want to talk,” murmured Samuel. “If we talk you must pay us.”
     I knew the rules. I got up to leave. Then Jonas, a kid about sixteen, with a straw hat and a bandaged stab wound on his shoulder stopped and sat down in my place. He had a story to tell about his sentence in Pollsmoor.
     “What’s Pollsmoor?” asked Samuel. “A children’s home?”
     “Hey, don’t be stu- “ began Jonas.
     “Shutup!” said Ashraf. Then he turned to his friend.
     “It’s prison, Samuel — not a children’s home.”
     They were silent.
     “No-one listens to me,” said Jonas suddenly. He flicked his cigarette into the gutter. “That’s why I steal.”

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