I walked solemnly for a good few streets, and I saw nothing. Everything hung in the air like a grey mist- as though there was a faint hint of smoke, but there was none.
It was quiet, though the wind blew through the canopy trees. The road was so wide, and the houses stood in their beautiful Marquette-type style. As I continued, the houses became more humble looking. Flat and unfurnished without the green hedges trimmed to perfection, and the patterned flowerbeds as before. There was not a stir amongst the trees. The roads were desolate. The driveways empty of vehicles. Everything mechanic was immobile. The feeling of death, but no sign of it.
Within an instant flash, like the moments had slipped away from me, I found myself crouched in a two door cupboard of a large family home, eating strawberries from an old Marks & Spencer’s tub. Three weeks seemed to have gone by. I sat there, terrified after having heard the three people I had last seen and known being shot outside in the street. To look beyond the window of the bedroom where I hid, there was no sign of the shooting, no stain, no decaying. Just a quiet suburban road.
Again I was hit by an untimely moment of reality, this time roaming the streets in an attempt not to be caught by the masses of police who surveyed the areas regularly, looking for perpetrators of colour or colour association: If you had an association with people of colour, if you were a person of colour, your fate was totality in the extreme- you were totally dead meat. I was anti-racism. I WOULD be on the wanted list. And they knew everyone by name. There in the distance stood a curly haired white-looking girl. About 12 years old. Alone and possibly wanting refuge. I took her under my wing. We found a deserted shop, that was roofless on the inside and the beams from the ceiling were hanging on the floor. Inside we crept into the darkest corners. Day-in and day-out I went into the deep, quiet hustle of the city centre to collect food and water for us. Though she looked white, she was of colour. One day, I returned and she was gone. I never saw her again. I knew she was dead. Vanished into the air like so many of the majority.
In the city hustle I heard the commotion of soldiers coming while in an old clothing store. The coloured men and woman scuttled for exits and back ally doors. I seemed to have forgotten my ‘wanted’ name, I seemed to have forgotten the dependency I had on the ‘flee aspect’. I stood rigid as I heard them announcing the names of the people they knew were inside and had no escape. One by one the named walked out into the street. A pregnant woman pleaded for her coloured father-to-be to not be shot. When she went silent I knew her fate had been taken up by the ‘Law’ we now ran from. And all those who stood aligned there faded like the afternoon sunshine. No stain on the street, no noise or weeping. As though nothing had ever happened. Men, woman, children- gone forever. And because they were of colour. As I turned to slide under the counter and disappear in the dusk, I saw her. A large Indian woman. Very attractive in the eyes, soft-looking. A convert. Holding her camera-looking gun at me. Smile, it is your shot!
“I do not want to die today. Today is not my day” I said. I seemed to have no fear, no idea what I was up against. “Then kill them” she said. As I turned to face the large window of the shop where she was looking, facing outwards onto the street, I saw 4 people whom I had lived with for a time, shared food and beds with, people I knew, with their children. It was as if they were looking at me and not seeing her holding the gun towards me. They were smiling, un-phased. I took the gun from her. But I could not hold it or pull the trigger because I wore gloves. And the gloves slipped repeatedly as I tried to pull them off- so I asked, “Will you pull these off?” As she did so, I mouthed to the foursome to RUN. After trying a few times unsuccessfully, they understood it. On my final glove sliding off and me turning to face her, I turned back to do what I was told, only to have an empty space beyond the window.
I turned to meet her eyes. I shrugged my shoulders. She knew what I had done. I knew my days were running short before I was caught. She walked away. Perhaps the only one who had anything ‘soft’. Minutes later Chris was there. He owned a Pizza House a few streets away- the kitchen was worked by coloured men, who all had families in hiding. Chris had heard about me and my collecting of the coloured people. He came to give me refuge, having heard I was wanted. In his flurry of things, he was somewhat perplexed that I was fearless, even in the face of death. “Is there something wrong with you woman?!”
In his kitchen later that day he was briefing his men that the police march was heading east for a while and that they should set out west-bound and just keep going. It was strange to see these men with their eyes so determined and fearful all at once. The buzzing kitchen emptied so fast. The only chance they had to really disappear. And in that silence so sudden, it was strange to be comforted in the arms of someone, someone who had the same cause and idea that I held in my heart. Perhaps too, someone who had seen so many killed by a system that was robotic, inhumane.
Days and weeks went by before I was faced with another death-in-my-face experience. I was holding a small infant child, found left hidden in a dump, supposedly for a dead mother to return. I saw them coming from a distance, and hid as low as I could in the bathroom. But I knew it was fruitless. The child coo’ed peacefully. I wondered where Chris was, because he hadn’t returned today at all. One learns to think nothing of it, because it is always as though nothing has happened, and you have to just keep running and hiding until they get you.
I closed my eyes. I opened them to a face I didn’t know, a face I could not see. In my arms I held all the life and love that mattered. I smiled. The sun shone brightly at that minute. I cannot recall what has happened from that moment.
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