The Incident on Heron Island

THE INCIDENT ON HERON ISLAND A NOVEL BY RICHARD JURGENS ‘And a silver star in the book of liars by your name.’

Walter Becker For Ashley Bayston, who appreciates Vivaldi © RICHARD JURGENS 2013

BARNCOTT PRESS LONDON – AMSTERDAM – PARIS – NEW YORK – KATHMANDU

This a free extract from Incident on Heron Island

by Richard Jurgens (Barncott Press 2014), available as an ebook and in print. Full purchasing details are here.

CONTENTS Foreword 1 1. Looking for Comrade Stalin 4 2. Prussians 27 3. Mystery on the Zeppelin Express 48 4. The Name is Garry Groovy 46 5. Good Times at the TranSky CafĂŠ 62 6. The Situation with Zeus 75 7. One Night at the Roxy 86 8. An Enemy of the Republic 100 9. The Third Earl 122 10. The Exploding Trousers 142 11. The Underground Gourmet 167 12. The Incident on Heron Island 190 Notes 205 About the Author 70

Foreword Hilton Ellis knew exactly who he was. There was a core of hard self-awareness to his vague dreaming. ‘I’m eccentric, lazy, fat, naïve and paranoid,’ he once wrote to me, ‘but also, I hope, a good friend and an amusing enough storyteller. Above anything I like entertaining people if this will also shake them from their trees a little.’

Well, he was all of these things. But now, it appears, he was a writer too. Who’d have guessed?

When he was on stage, and firing on all cylinders, he often had his audiences rolling in the aisles, splitting their sides, or at least grinning in – what’s that word the critics like? – ironic recognition. Apart from sketches in his journals, though, he never wrote any of his things down.

He was obsessively loyal to the fleeting nature of his art.

He had got it into his head, I’m not sure how, that the age-old tradition of the spoken story – as practiced by the bards, scops and griots of old who travelled about, earning a dinner or a night’s rest here and there by telling tales – has been lost to our world of books, newspapers, TV, cinema, internet and all the rest. So his work depended, against all the odds of his time, on the immediacy of the spoken word.

In his fantastic world, good always won out over bad: the dove and the jackal, that kind of thing. Or the small got the better of the big, as in his story about the marriage of the elephant and the flea. And then there 1

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were tales like the one about the radioactive shrimp from Chernobyl, in which greedy self-interest lost out in the end to poetic justice. (Which is only a consolation if you’re a poet, if you ask me. But anyway.)

I suspect that writing was actually easier for him.

Several times he admitted to me that he had suffered all his life from an almost totally numbing stage fright. It would have been safer for him to write, rather than perform. But he made himself do the one thing that he feared most – get up on a stage and entertain audiences, face to face, with the little stories he invented.

It was his personal heroism in a way. He was like a man with claustrophobia who deals with his fear by telling jokes in the lift.

Now I think he looked down on writing as a device of distance. As editor of the City Eye, I sometimes had to hold a gun (figuratively anyway) to his head to make him get his pieces in. Although of course he claims differently, as we see in one of the stories included here. He suggests that he was a model contributor, always ready with fresh copy. Great joke, Hilton!

Aside from the occasional spat arising from his latest missed deadline, we were good friends for years. We’d meet at least once a week to catch up. And sometimes, when he was in the mood, he’d tell me some of his ‘reality stories’, as he called them – accounts of the colourful characters he had met in the course of an unconventional life. I often urged him to write them 2

down, but I never really thought he would. Like I said, writing was easy for him, but it is still hard work. Which is probably another reason why he looked down in it.

So it was a surprise to find out that he had actually committed some of those stories to paper. When we, a small group of his friends, got together to sort out his estate, we found a manuscript, or at least the elements of one, among his documents. It was a parting gift, it seemed – or a Parthian shot. Aside from some longer pieces, which will need more sorting out (and which I will leave for another occasion) all of them are collected here.

Our friend, we learn, judged us, we who feature in his book, by the quality of the tales that we tell about ourselves. In this, he was a connoisseur. So if he catches us in the act of telling lies or deceiving ourselves and each other, it is because he knows that we do so each in our individual ways, and for uniquely different reasons. And if he calls us liars, it is perhaps to challenge us to come up with the truth – or at least, a better story.

To conclude, I have tried to act as a loyal editor. As everyone at the City Eye knew, his spelling and punctuation often required some correction. Aside from this, given the chaotic state of his affairs, compiling this book has been an exercise in detective work. In the end, though, it emerges that he had a clear and coherent plan for it all along. R.P.

3

1. Looking for Comrade Stalin In a way my life began when I arrived at the home affairs office that day, puffing heavily and considerably dishevelled, to hear if my future had been decided.

I’d been in a stateless limbo for several years by then, my applications for asylum always being refused.

Everything depended on the hearing that had been scheduled for that morning. You’d have thought that I’d have arrived better prepared, or at least, in a better state of mind, But as I’d been discovering, life doesn’t always go to plan in a country not your own, where the forms of things aren’t always familiar.

‘Where were you?’ my lawyer hissed.

Sitting down on the bench beside her, I noticed that my Doc Martins were caked in a fine grey dust. They looked as if they’d been through a war.

‘We were supposed to do some final preparation,’ the lawyer said, as she considered the white plaster cast on my nose. ‘Are you all right?’

She was a fine young woman with earnest eyes. A thick dossier lay beside her on the waiting room bench. I was aware that she was working pro bono and that she needed to believe that I deserved the state’s assistance and protection. The civil servants who would shortly hear my case were filing into the meeting room with hangingjudge expressions on their faces, but I was too distracted to think about them.

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Instead, I noticed a picture of the new queen on the wall of the waiting room. Only a few days had passed since she’d ascended the throne. She looked dignified but approachable in her formal gown, like a friendly Dutch aunt.

‘We have a problem, Mr Ellis,’ said the lawyer. ‘Can you explain this?’

She held up a newspaper. It was that morning’s edition of the Telegraaf. The front page featured an article about raids on squatted buildings around the city. Next to it was a large black-and-white photograph.

‘Scenes of disgraceful behaviour reigned in the city this weekend,’ the lawyer said, translating. ‘Rival groups of thugs attempted to disrupt Her Majesty’s coronation.

Several notorious ringleaders have been arrested.’

She tapped her pen on the newspaper. Looking more closely, I saw that I featured prominently in the picture. I was surrounded by a group of neo-Nazi thugs, and looked as if I was on the point of administering an energetic head-butt to a swastika-tattooed forehead. The picture screamed ‘thug’, ‘scum’, ‘disturber of the peace’.

It would not be an advantage to my final application for asylum.

‘It’s not what it looks like,’ I said.

She considered me carefully. ‘All right,’ she said at last, glancing at the door of the committee room. ‘I will see if I can get us a few more minutes.’

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She placed the newspaper carefully on the thick dossier beside her. Then she got up, knocked on the door and vanished into the committee room.

Left alone in the silent hallway, I thought back over the last couple of days. I’d joined the crowds in the streets for the coronation of course. I’d put some thought into the matter and had decided to pose as a tourist. I was wearing an old denim jacket, a pair of jeans and a camera that swung on my chest. It was an old Leica M2 that I’d picked up at the flea market. The costume, a layer of normality if you like, worked wonderfully. The policemen at the barricades around the square barely glanced at me.

On the streets, hordes of patriotic folk of the city were waving tricolours of blue, white and red. The palace had been renovated and it shone like a newly painted doll’s house in the pale sunlight. Orange streamers were blowing in the wind. Thousands of protesters had also taken to the streets to object to the extravagance of the occasion. Seeing the gilded coach waiting outside the Nieuwe Kerk, it was difficult not to feel that they had a point. After all, this was a period in history when homelessness and unemployment were rife.

The protesters were converging on the Great Emperor, a former newspaper building not far from the palace that had been squatted by a group of leading anarchists. As it happened, that was my destination too. I pushed against the swell but it was hard going. Surrounded by all those 6

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bodies, I felt a sudden sense of panic. Clouds of ganja smoke were drifting, and the unique smells of the underground – armpits, teeth, feet. I noticed that the Irish pub on the corner had retreated into its testudo of metal awnings.

Further along the road, groups of protesters in orangedyed dreads were sitting in circles among the tramlines, passing joints and bottles. Some were working the crowd, selling beads, magical stones, pancakes, music cassettes. A man with a large beard and the burning eyes of a believer was walking around with a placard that said THE QUEEN FOR PRESIDENT. Someone was playing a bittersweet melody on an accordion. A cloud of black balloons had been released. They bobbed up into the sky past the figure of Atlas on the roof of the palace where he stood bowed down by the weight of the world.

Held captive by the sheer mass of people around me, I found myself pressed against the window of Madame Tussaud’s. As it happened, that day Rembrandt was doing service in the window display. The artist’s wise, pudgy face stared impassively back at me from under a large beret. Long ago, in his time, people had been executed on that square and impromptu teams had played football with their severed heads.

Brushing aside this reminder of the potential risks of civil unrest, even in a civilised country, I pushed again into the tide of people. I’d been trying for weeks to get an audience with the higher-ups at the Great Emperor, but 7

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they’d remained as inaccessible as the Soviet Central Committee. I wanted, at least, to know what they looked like. This time I used my feet and elbows freely. After a few minutes of pushing I reached the steps of the old Art Deco building with its extravagant pre-Depression era nymphs and gargoyles. They were guarded by a group of determined-looking hard-liners who were wearing old leather jackets as stiff as body armour. It wasn’t clear if the squatter leaders were among them.

Searching the sea of faces, I spotted one at least that was familiar – but it was too late to consider a quick retreat into the safety of the crowd. Typical of fate, I thought. Here I was in the middle of a vast mass of people, and I’d run into the one man I owed money to.

Janos had noticed me too. Today he was wearing boots, camouflage trousers and a T-shirt with the words STREET HASSLE on its front.

‘Hey,’ I said unenthusiastically.

‘What are you doing here?’ Janos said, as he pushed through the crowd toward me. He was dark, stocky, powerful. ‘This isn’t where you need to be. The real action’s near city hall.’

He noticed the camera on my chest. ‘That thing loaded?’ But he didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Great. Come with me. Maybe you’ll be useful. We’ll need pictures of the action.’

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‘Action?’ I didn’t like the sound of that. I’d only brought the camera along as a prop. ‘This was supposed to be a peaceful protest!’

‘Fuck flower power,’ said Janos. ‘Why do you think all these people are here? We’re angry, man. We’re the new generation.’

‘About the rent,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay you soon.’

‘Of course you will,’ said Janos. ‘That’s how it works.

But now we need you to be useful.’

Reluctantly I followed him through the crowd. The atmosphere nearer the city hall was a lot tenser than it had been near the palace square. A large group of protesters had come to a halt at the Blauwbrug. SWAT squads in helmets and black uniforms had lined up to prevent them from crossing the bridge. A strained silence hung over this confrontation between citizens and state.

One of the police officers blared an instruction into a megaphone. Whatever he said, it was whipped away by the wind.

Quite unexpectedly, I experienced a sense of belonging.

The protesters only wanted houses after all. Like me, they needed places to live. On the other hand, I thought, there might be dangers here. Hardcore squatters were assembling in units behind the lines of students and hippies thronging at the front. They were dressed in frightening battle gear: studded jackets, boots, motorcycle helmets. Weapons were being brought into view. People were hefting baseball bats. Someone was holding a 9

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Molotov cocktail, its rag ready for the flame. Piles of cobblestones and bits of loose paving stood ready for use as missiles.

Suddenly I felt strongly that I hadn’t signed up for this.

I wouldn’t have been here if Janos didn’t drag me along. I started to pull away, but Janos applied a scientific dose of pressure to my elbow, turning my knees to marshmallow.

Unable to resist, I was pulled relentlessly through the crowd. It was all I could do to stay upright.

Seeing Janos approaching, a couple of squatter soldiers detached themselves from their units and came to greet him. They glanced sceptically at me.

‘Comrades, we have our photographer,’ Janos said.

The men looked at me with new interest. One of them draped a heavy arm around my shoulder.

‘Can you shoot with that?’ he said. ‘As good as this?’

He pulled a shiny metal catapult from an inner pocket of his heavy leather jacket. It looked like a giant silver wishbone. Its elastic bands were as thick as strips of leather.

Lord, I’d been thinking, give me a normal life – but not yet. Now I wasn’t so sure. * Waiting in the hallway, I looked at the rows of chairs, the portrait of the smiling new queen, the clock. Time was meaningless. I was perfectly suspended between past and future. It was up to me to find the door that linked 10

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them. Janos, of course, was the key. Several little marbles of cold sweat rolled down my spine. This was my condition now. Exile. The shape of your life determined by strangers.

Janos had, in fact, been the first person I’d met after my release from the refugee centre. As an applicant for asylum, I’d first been accommodated in an old building that had formerly been a leper hospital. I spent several months there while my bona fides were checked. It was convenient enough as a place to stay while I explored the alleys and squares of the old city. Then, just like that, I was informed that my case had passed the first hurdle and that I was free to go. I’d receive a small weekly dole.

Otherwise I’d have to look after myself.

I shouldered my rucksack and walked across town with a light heart. To my surprise it felt good to have my life in my own hands. The summer sky hung over the city like a translucent blue bowl. I felt almost as if I were on holiday.

On Leidseplein, in the restaurant district, tourists fresh from showers in their hotel rooms were watching the street artists who performed there when it was sunny. A crowd had gathered round a thin man who was balancing on a unicycle. Pedalling frantically, he was blowing bursts of yellow flame into the bright air. Further on, another crowd had collected to listen to a barefoot musician who was playing an assortment of amplified wooden instruments. He was producing a wall of sound, a wave of interlocking rhythms like some apocalyptic rock band. He 11

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might have been celebrating the end of a world or the birth of a new one. Hawkers around the square were offering for sale bead necklaces, bird whistles, watercolour paintings of the canals, henna tattoos. A couple of policewomen were patrolling the tramlines, chatting like two friends out for an afternoon trot.

Tiring of the holiday atmosphere, I walked on to the park. I’d hang out there sometimes, wordlessly happy to have escaped the Republic. The park attracted young people from all over the world. There’d been a time when hippies had raised tents here, watched impassively by the national poet from his pedestal. The lawns had once looked like a free festival. But that was during the Summer of Love when no one was thinking clearly. Now sleeping rough in the park was forbidden. But I’d heard that it could still be managed if you kept out of sight of the cops.

After some searching I found a good spot under a thick clump of bushes near the poet’s statue. It was well hidden from the wind and passing eyes. I sat on a nearby bench, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon. The park was full of young people strolling about or lying on the grass.

Evening gathered slowly in the trees. The park emptied.

When it was dark I got into my sleeping bag. From the cover of the bushes I had a good view of the empty paths and the rows of yellow Victorian lanterns.

Now that I was out in the world, I recalled that it was Friday evening. Back home, in Johannesburg, my father 12

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would be hosting one of his regular weekly dinners. As the editor of the Republic’s most liberal newspaper, he prided himself on attracting the prominent, the famous and the notorious to his table. His lavish entertainments were known on the back pages of the Sunday Times as ‘the notoriously secretive Houghton Club’.

Maurice, the head chef from the Carlton Hotel would have been hired for the day, with a contingent of waiters and kitchen staff. Morrison, the Malawian butler would show guests to the dining room, where they would be wined and dined under candlelight at the baronial dining table. Later they would loosen their belts, puff foot-long Montecristos and be pumped for information. The old man liked to do things in style.

Well, I didn’t miss that world, I told myself – only some of its creature comforts. I settled deeper into my sleeping bag. I was awoken at three o’ clock in the morning by a light in my eyes. The light came from a torch held by a policeman. He was a young man, accompanied by an older colleague. The cops were polite but insistent. They gave me five minutes to pack my rucksack. Then they escorted me to the park gate. They weren’t fools either, they waited until I turned the corner.

My mind was still fuzzy with sleep. When my surroundings came into focus, I saw that I was in a street of substantial villas. To judge by the discreet signs and brass plaques on their elegant porticoes most of them were now the offices of bankers, lawyers and private 13

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clinics. The villas were painted white, not a common colour in this city of old red brick. The street in the early morning was eerily quiet. I’d just been dreaming of the slap-up meal that my father’s guests would have been served last night and wanted to get back to sleep.

I thought of unrolling my sleeping bag somewhere in the shadows. But the police had already ejected me from the park, where I’d been troubling no one, they’d hardly tolerate a drifter in this well-heeled neighbourhood.

Maybe I’d have to walk the streets of the sleeping city until the Salvation Army hostel opened. A fellow inmate at the refugee centre had told me that they served breakfast there at seven. In the meantime I felt very vulnerable in the darkness of the street. There was no one about, nevertheless I felt that I was being watched.

This suspicion was suddenly explained when a figure detached itself from the darkness. It was a stocky man, dressed from head to toe in black.

‘Hey man, need a place to stay?’ the man said.

‘What?’

‘You’re looking for a house, right?’ the man said in a familiar way.

‘Well yes,’ I said, my heart still thumping. ‘Somewhere to sleep, anyway.’

‘You’re in luck then,’ said the man. ‘I just found a place.’ He indicated the villa that rose from the shadows of the pavement.

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‘The curtains are just for show,’ the man continued.

‘I’ve been checking the place out. There’s no furniture inside. No one’s living there. That means it’s fair game.

Wanna help crack it?’

Somehow I didn’t feel that I could refuse. It turned out that the man had a canvas bag full of tools with him.

These included a couple of sturdy crowbars, a wire cutter and a range of metal files and screwdrivers. He wanted me to hold a crowbar against the step to provide a fulcrum for the other crowbar that he would use to force the door. We had the front door of the villa open in no time. The place was spookily empty. The sitting room alone could have contain`ed several apartments.

‘Christ, man, put that out!’ the man said brusquely, sweeping away the cigarette lighter that I flicked on. It hit the floor with a little crack and the house returned to darkness.

‘Sorry.’

‘You’ve never cracked a place before, have you?’ the man said, drawing nearer. To judge by his odour, bathrooms were scarce in the squatter world.

‘No. I only got into town a few months ago.’

‘A newbie! Welcome to the underground.’

‘So we can stay here, then?’

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘And no. Depends.’

‘On what?’

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‘Nothing in this life is free,’ the man replied enigmatically. ‘I’m Janos, by the way. And if you want to stay here, you’ll pay rent.’

By this time my eyes had adjusted to the darkness. In the dim light that leaked into the place from a street lamp I could see the man was smiling. He appeared to have forgotten that he’d had help ‘cracking’ the villa. I was outraged. I was tempted to leave the man to his new domain. But given the unexpected prospect of a night with a roof over my head, I stayed.

Now, sitting in the corridor, waiting for the lawyer to appear, I recalled an incident from my youth back in the Republic. I was lying by the pool at my father’s house. It was during the summer holiday. I’d been hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl next door, who wore a little polkadot bikini when she went swimming. To my disappointment, though, I never saw her. Like everyone else in the neighbourhood, she was probably at the coast.

The neighbours’ dog, though, was around. He was an Alsatian called Castro and an unusually aggressive beast.

There’d been words between the households about him.

He had a habit of appearing suddenly at the hedge to bark at anyone he saw next door. But that day, it being warm, he was dozing peacefully under a tree.

Time went slowly by as it does when there isn’t much to do. Birds called in the trees. Morrison brought me an icecold Seven-Up. I listened to David Bowie on my new portable cassette. ‘There is a happy land where only 16

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children live...’ It was then that Nemesis appeared in the garden next door. He was a large black cat who lived at a house a few doors up the road, but regarded the gardens of the street as his territory.

Emerging from the bushes, he strolled over the vast green lawn, waving his white-pointed tail like a flag. He sat down to lick his paws and wipe his raffish white mask.

Having finished his preening, he looked around for something else to do. He spotted Castro snoozing quietly in the shade.

Interested in this diversion, Nemesis padded softly toward the Alsatian. Castro slept on. The cat drew closer.

Castro started awake, suddenly aware of a shadow, a smell perhaps. Still muggy from his sleep, he looked up to find the cat’s impassive mask staring at him from close range. Which brought him instantly to full wakefulness.

The two animals looked at each other. The odds of conflict were weighed. The mutual calculation wasn’t favourable for the dog, apparently, despite his much greater size. After a brief hesitation he got up and shambled off, his tail between his legs.

Nemesis had looked mildly disappointed, like a pub bully cheated of a fight. Then he’d settled into the warm spot that Castro had just vacated and gone to sleep. That was exactly what Janos was like. *

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I was still in the empty corridor. Still on the bench.

Kicking my heels. Waiting for news of the young lawyer’s consultations behind that closed door. She’d been in there a long time. What was she telling these people, legal types like herself, bureaucrats? Would they really want to hear about what went on in the real world?

At the bridge the silent confrontation had suddenly turned to action. The officer with the megaphone barked another instruction. Several loud pops went off as tear gas canisters were fired into the crowd. A water cannon moved up the line. Its powerful jet cut swathes through the melee, sweeping protesters off their feet. The SWAT teams charged, laying into the crowd left and right. They worked like lumberjacks, their batons rising and falling.

Protesters yelled insults at the soldiers, threw cobblestones, called warnings. I was suddenly surrounded by running people and falling bodies.

Under the onslaught, many of the protesters started fleeing. Some of the squatter units, meanwhile, decided not to give in to the pressure. Instead, they donned their crash helmets and charged into the crowd, toward the SWAT goons. This was all they’d ever wanted – a chance of open battle with the state.

Arms crossed, Janos was surveying the battle with the serenity of a man in his element. He noticed me looking at him.

‘Ready?’

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But I was wrestling with the camera strap. The thing had implicated me in this. I wanted to get rid of it. Close by, too close, a longhaired student ran straight into a baton that had been stuck in front of him like a traffic boom. It was as if he hit a clothes line at neck height, his sharp-toed boots flew into the air.

‘What are you doing?’ Janos grabbed my elbow. ‘We need pictures! This one will be perfect.’

All around us people were running, hitting, swearing, yelling. Foolishly, I raised the camera. There was nothing to do now but click the button. It gave me something to do anyway while the battle raged. The student lay writhing and moaning. I pretended to get a shot of him.

The noise of the conflict around us was incredible.

‘That’s good,’ Janos yelled. ‘More!’

He steered me through the melee. Caught up suddenly by the excitement, I started snapping away. The atmosphere of violence, of reasonable discourse abandoned, was suddenly very shocking. These people only wanted houses, places to live. What could be wrong in that? Now I really hoped that the camera would work.

If I got any pictures today, they’d be evidence from the front. Unreasonable force. Police brutality.

People were still being swept off their feet by the water cannon. Overhead, a helicopter was clattering. On the ground, a helmeted squatter unit had cornered a cop.

They were kicking the shit out of him. I thought I got a good shot of that. Further on, I saw a man raising the 19

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black flag of revolt in the swirling smoke. I got a great shot of that too. I was now entirely focused on the images that I was seeing through the narrow lens.

It was only then that I realised that I’d lost my bearings.

I had no idea where I was. Janos had vanished. The swell of action had pushed me into a group of black-clad punks. Leather. Swastikas. Rows of chunky silver death’s head rings like knuckledusters. The camera knocked awkwardly on my chest as I started trying to push my way past them.

A hand grabbed my jacket. ‘You a journalist?’

I shook my head, but the man’s interest attracted the attention of his comrades. A hand that was all scarred knuckles fingered the peace sign on my lapel.

‘Hey guys, we’ve got ourselves a fucking hippie!’

I caught a glimpse of Janos staring at me from the crowd. I flashed a priority all-channel SOS. Giving me a look of pity, however, Janos vanished into the fighting.

‘What’s this?’ the first man said, seizing the camera on my chest. He stared into my eyes. ‘You taking pictures?’

I had an impression of a swastika in the middle of the man’s forehead. Maybe it was intended to be some sort of awful third eye. There were definitely SS lightning flash symbols tattooed on the man’s thick neck.

‘I was looking for someone,’ I said while my knees shook.

‘Who?’ said the punk captain.

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Very inconveniently, the little imp of contrariness that lives inside me and shows itself at awkward moments now took a hand in the proceedings.

‘Comrade Stalin,’ I said. ‘I was looking for Comrade Stalin.’

The expression of astonishment on the man’s roughhewn face was satisfying. Briefly I noted the tattooed swastika approaching my face at high speed before the lights went out.

I woke in a hospital bed a few hours later. I’d been brought there while still unconscious. The ward was full of people who’d been injured during the riots. There were broken limbs in plaster. There were lots of black eyes, cuts, scratches, bruises. They kept me in overnight, suspecting concussion. I was pleased enough to stay there; I wouldn’t, at any rate, have to deal with Janos. The nurses didn’t like treating people whose injuries had been incurred through their participation in civil disorder.

They took the view that anyone with an injury had received an appropriate dose of their own medicine.

None of us was treated gently.

On the tram, the following morning, I found that I was squinting in the sharp light. My broken nose throbbed painfully and my eyes watered. I could see enough to note that the city was quiet. Shop fronts along the Rokin had been boarded up as if for a war. The streets were littered with the aftermath of the riots – the ash of fires, pieces of broken office furniture, a confetti of protest flyers. There 21

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were bits of clothing. A torn leather jacket. A single shoe.

A trampled cap. The abandoned items had an odd poignancy. Bits of lives left behind.

My head was pounding by the time I got home. It was a relief to see the spray-painted anarchy sign on the peeling door. I had a room on the second floor with a pleasing view of the overgrown back garden. The thought of my things waiting loyally for me was a comfort. I wanted to lie down and contemplate the ceiling. But the lock wouldn’t turn when I inserted my key.

I thought of ringing the doorbell, and then remembered that only Janos’s friends were allowed to disturb him. I was wondering what to do when Janos himself opened the door. He was dressed in a pair of white boxer shorts and rubbing his ribbed six-pack with one hand. In the other he held a can of beer.

‘Jesus!’ he said, looking with an expert’s appreciation at my bruised face.

‘I’ve been in hospital,’ I said.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. And I really need to sleep.’

‘Okay.’ Janos made no effort to stand aside.

‘In my room,’ I said pointedly.

‘What room?’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t pay your rent, man,’ Janos said, in the sorrowful tone of an insurance man explaining why the client couldn’t expect a payout.

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‘You can’t be serious.’

Janos shrugged.

‘But what about my things?’

‘You can collect them if you want,’ Janos said. ‘I can’t do anything with them.’

He stepped aside at last to allow me in. We went up the stairs. My door had a shiny new padlock on it, and my stuff was piled at the end of the corridor. My crumpled tent. My hats. My overcoat and boots. My collection of cheap sunglasses. My Walkman, the headphone cord tangled round it.

Seeing this, my resolve crumbled. Only a few days ago I’d decided to report the man’s slumlord practices.

Though they probably didn’t like to admit it, even anarchists must have rules, I thought – and ways to enforce them. That’s why I’d been on my way to the Great Emperor. I’d wanted to know who to see, who to pour out my woes to when I got the chance. But what was abstract principle now, compared to a roof over my head?

‘Look, I’ll pay you when I can,’ I said.

Janos shrugged again. Obviously he’d heard that one before.

‘I found your camera yesterday, by the way,’ he remarked in a conversational tone. ‘It’s in my room. You took some great pictures yesterday, dude. The film was old but there are some good images. I think we’ll be able to use them.’

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At this I gulped, seeking words. The hammering in my head reached a crescendo. Rage burned through me like an electric current. I didn’t care about the pictures. I cared about the housing crisis – my housing crisis. People in the underground were supposed to help each other.

That was what all the fighting had been about. That was why we’d risked our lives, our health and even our social security. The sudden strong emotion almost made my knees buckle.

Dizzily, I set about gathering my things. I folded the tent and inserted it into its canvas bag. I rolled up the sleeping bag and attached it to my rucksack., I saw then that my headphones had been smashed. I’d be on the road again and I wouldn’t even have a soundtrack. At the same time, though, the activity was oddly reassuring.

Maybe it would be good to move on.

Janos returned, now in a shirt, shorts and trainers.

‘Here,’ he said. He handed me a print of a black-andwhite photograph. It was a fine-grained close-up, taken a microsecond before the Nazi punk’s tattooed forehead collided with mine. The look on my face, I saw, was surprisingly belligerent.

‘Hey, you must have taken this!’ I said, after a moment.

‘Like I said, I found your camera,’ Janos said.

‘But what about the other pictures? What about my camera.’

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‘You still owe me money, dude,’ Janos said, smiling in that annoyingly confident way of his. ‘You’ll get them when you pay me.’ * Back at the home affairs office, the lawyer finally emerged from the committee room. She was looking pleased with herself: a good sign.

‘They will see us now,’ she said.

‘But I haven’t told you what happened,’ I replied.

‘Don’t you want to know?’

‘It won’t be necessary.’

‘You were gone a long time,’ I said.

‘The events of the last few days have brought us quite a few things to discuss. They have other cases than yours to deal with, you know.’

‘So you didn’t discuss my case, then?’

‘Naturally we did. The main thing is that you were not arrested.’

‘So it’s open and shut?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s a done deal?’ I translated. ‘You’ve made an arrangement?’

‘Not at all,’ she replied primly. ‘We don’t do things like that. What you have to say will be very important.’

I’d learned something useful, anyway, while I waited.

Thinking it all out, I’d realised that Janos must have sold the picture to the Telegraaf – a rabid royalist rag if ever 25

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there was one. He’d sold out. And that information might come in useful one day if our paths ever crossed again.

‘Are you sure you want to go in looking like that?’ the lawyer said. ‘This is the highest court of the land, you know. This is your last chance.’

I was wearing the scuffed Doc Martins, as I said. For the rest, I was all character and colour. Camouflage trousers. T-shirt with rainbow. Large rock crystal pendant. A trench coat that I’d covered in psychedelic spirals during a spectacular acid trip in Rhodes. And of course, my khaki pith helmet. These were the only clean things I had, after my long night in the park. This time the cops hadn’t found me.

‘Well, the sunglasses, then,’ she said.

Rather than explaining, I took them off. I’d freshened up in the restroom at a McDonald’s on the way over. A glance in the mirror there had revealed the impressive black shiners on either side of the white plaster cast on my nose. The diamante-winged Dame Edna sunglasses actually made me look less strange.

This a free extract from Incident on Heron Island

by Richard Jurgens (Barncott Press 2014), available as an ebook and in print. Full purchasing details are here.

26

2. Prussians Autonomy. That was the buzzword in Amsterdam during the radical early 1980s. Rather than be told what to do, or helped to do it by an interfering nanny state, underground folk did things for themselves.

There was nothing the mainstream world did that they couldn’t do too. They had their own fashions, modes of speech and nodes of social power. Squatter groups held regular cultural evenings and political meetings. And as part of all this, squatter centres sometimes offered courses on the art of legally occupying empty premises.

Well, I’d ‘made my bones’ by then; I’d squatted a place on my own. That evening, attending an information session for squatter wannabes, I wasn’t seeking advice on how to enter and occupy an empty building. No, I needed to know how to keep the house I’d squatted. The principle of autonomy can be taken too far, even by anarchists.

So I was cruising the crowd in the busy hall, keeping an eye out for faces I might know, when I spotted Lang Willem. Even in a country of tall people, the man stood a head above everyone else. His hair – ‘a distinguished mane’, as one newspaper had put it – was greyer now.

That was the strain of leadership for you. Or maybe it was the late nights. No one kept regular hours in the underground.

‘Hey, Willem,’ I called, ‘Long time!’

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At the sound of his name, the squatter leader stopped and turned. The expression on his bony face might have signalled recognition. Seizing that slender thread, I hurried over. As I approached, some of the tough young guys who surrounded him moved forward to protect their leader. A younger generation was abroad in the squatter world these days. Not for them the occasional confrontations that had been common only a few years ago. They wore their scuffed boots, worn black trousers, torn black T-shirts and orange braids like the uniform of a new doctrine of conflict.

‘Willem,’ I said. ‘I thought it was you!’

The squatter leader nodded, but said nothing. The soldiers backed off.

‘I just thought I’d say hello,’ I continued.

Hardly a year ago, my house on Haarlemmerplein had been Lang Willem’s first introduction to the scene. That had been after he’d left his job, his wife, his kids and suburbia to follow a new calling. I was still fresh on the scene myself, but I’d been his mentor. The new man, a former teacher, had shown tremendous aptitude and had risen rapidly. His name had soon featured regularly in newspapers, police reports and intelligence files. Since then he’d become something of a warlord, to judge by the little private army that surrounded him – a real Duke Borgia in the invisible hierarchy.

Meanwhile, I had remained a lowly peasant. But a peasant, anyway, who’d once given refuge to a man on 28

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the rise. Which was why an idea suddenly occurred to me when I saw Lang Willem in the crowd. Our brief shared history meant that I could surely appeal to the duke. A man with an army might be induced to deploy it for a friend.

Given the duke’s cool response, though, the spiel I’d been mentally improvising suddenly vanished. My mouth wouldn’t move, my tongue wouldn’t shape the words.

Later I reflected that it was fortunate that I didn’t have time to frame my appeal. Strangely enough, anarchists often move in packs. And I guess that my guardian angel, if not my conscious mind, knew that they’d tear me apart if I presented myself as a victim.

‘Well,’ Lang Willem said. ‘Nice to see you.’

He turned to go, followed by his entourage. One of the goons was a young guy with a long scar slashed through the stubble on his skull. He would have been at home in the Soviet army. His green eyes considered me with cool amusement as the bodyguard swept past.

Scenes like this must have occurred millions of times in history. Snubbing someone you owe a debt of gratitude to is one of the pleasures of life. It’s what humans do when they get the chance. All the same, philosophising about it didn’t help to process the rage.

Still boiling, I surveyed the room, hoping to see another face I might recognise. As I said, things had changed since I’d last visited anarchist information sessions like this. Now I saw that a crowd of nervous-looking middle29

INCIDENT ON HERON ISLAND

class newbies were in. They were also a sign of the times.

Even a year before, many of them would probably never have considered illegal action. Now they were milling around, taking up floor space and waiting for an opportunity to seek advice on how to get into the scene.

Old proprieties go out the window when you find yourself faced with the prospect of living on the street.

The experts at the tables, meanwhile, were very busy, listening and talking. They were sketching diagrams, and handing out pamphlets with blueprints of locks and window frames and ways to open them. They were also well supplied with lists of relevant by-laws and regulations.

I too had been homeless once. I’d learned practical things at sessions just like this – the technical aspects of breaking and entering. And armed with new knowledge, I’d soon found myself a place to live. It was a house in the city centre that looked over a pretty square. And given its location, it had been something of a miracle to find it unoccupied.

Other people had soon moved in but I didn’t mind, I’d selected a quiet room at the back for myself with a view of a courtyard full of shady trees. It was even reassuring to detect the throb of music and footsteps in the hall.

These sounds of other people going about their lives lent my own existence a kind of legitimacy. And I was safe, at least, from the pressing problem of finding somewhere to

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live – from the sense of muted desperation that filled the squatter centre tonight.

For months a steady calm had filled the house. Recently, though, a problem had arisen. It had begun a few weeks ago, when my siesta was interrupted by a roar of rock music – AC/DC at full volume. Like the song says, the walls were shaking, the earth was quaking. Startled awake, I listened to the noise for a while and then decided that it couldn’t be tolerated.

Still muggy from my afternoon sleep, I charged up the stairs to find that someone had taken occupation of one of the attic rooms. A lean ginger-haired man was lying on a mattress, listening to the music with his eyes closed, his arms behind his head. A bulging new Alpine rucksack lay at his feet. A set of exercise equipment lay ready for use in a corner. He looked like a refugee from suburbia gone walkabout. He didn’t look like he had any kind of natural right to be there.

Angrily, I strode over to the boom box and turned the volume down to zero.

‘Hey, are you moving in?’ I said.

Opening his eyes at the sudden silence, the intruder considered me with insolent casualness. Then, without bothering to answer, he got up and turned the volume back up to ten.

‘We do have rules here, you know,’ I yelled over the noise.

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Which wasn’t, of course, strictly true. The anarchist symbol on the front door wasn’t there for nothing. Rules were for the weak. But there was an unspoken agreement that everyone should fit in. You knew you were fitting in if no one objected to your presence.

Anyway, the intruder returned to his mattress, still without speaking, put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, leaving me to stand there impotently wondering what to do. From that moment his presence in the house was difficult to ignore. He played his music day or night. Sometimes he worked out and the loud clanks of his exercise equipment echoed through the house. Even the other occupants, who’d been mostly invisible until then, got annoyed. House meetings were held, anger vented. In the end the group decided to weather the storm in the hope that the intruder would soon move out.

So things had continued for a while – until, coming home one night, I found a flyer pushed under my door.

Done in crude style on a Roneo machine, it yelled: WHITE NATION ARISE! HOLLAND FOR THE HOLLANDERS! I was surprised at how shocked I was. I hadn’t expected to encounter this kind of thing in this city, which is famous for its liberal values. I’d come six thousand miles to find a refuge from such madness. And squatters, surely, were the vanguard. They were supposed to be alternative.

My first instinct was to confront the man. But the clanking of exercise equipment upstairs reminded me 32

INCIDENT ON HERON ISLAND

that the fellow might not be afraid of a physical confrontation. After some thought, I decided on a less direct protest. I went downstairs to take a dump in the café toilet. Then very deliberately I collected the results in the flyer and deposited the resulting package, gleaming and moist, under the invader’s attic room door.

Retrospect, that wise teacher, soon made me realise that it might have been better to take another course. Soon after that, someone got into my room and removed some of my favourite books – a translation of La Fontaine, a well-thumbed copy of Atlas Shrugged (the amoral ruthlessness of its one-dimensional characters was rather appealing at the time) and a spineless second-hand copy of the Oxford Shorter English Dictionary. The books had been piled outside my room, soaked with inflammable liquid and set on fire. I was lucky to spot the flickering of the flames under the door and stamp them out.

By way of an answer, I’d strewn a bag of garbage in the man’s room when he wasn’t in. It was a paltry response and it didn’t help to settle matters. Letting myself into the house one night soon after that, I was blinded by a sudden explosion of light, followed by a maniacal giggling in the darkness. I stood there blinking in the gloom while my heart leapt in my chest like a shot rabbit.

The next day a Polaroid was posted under my door of me looking startled in the stark light of a camera flash.

The photo was decorated with a drawing, done in glossy red paint, of a stick man hanging from a gallows.

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Clearly the situation was getting out of hand. You don’t want to have to worry about what might happen every time you go home. * Night was settling on the street outside when I emerged from the smoke of the old school hall. A blue sky still lingered over the roofs. Lights in the windows above the shops were going on.

Amsterdam. Its dusks so deliciously slow and gentle, like a clean white sheet falling onto a bed.

Sometimes, walking in a street like this, I could be almost overcome with wonder. I loved the way houses and shops, apartments and studios pressed so close to each other, shoulder to shoulder. There was an unassuming beauty about the city that was quite unlike the grandeur of more imperial capitals. It was so different to the enormous pretension of the wealthy suburbs I’d known back in the Republic. This was a city on a human scale. I was, I supposed, beginning to feel at home.

I was grateful, too, for the sudden fresh air. My impression of the country before I’d arrived had been based on posters in travel agents’ offices that featured fresh-faced young men and women consuming herring and cheese against a background of blue sky. I’d imagined that it would be as squeaky clean as Scandinavia. But as I’d discovered, when you walked into

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a bar here or a nightclub or a private party, you soon found yourself coughing in a cloud of dense smoke.

I looked down the street with its long rows of houses and shops. My home, such as it was, lay at the end of the road, looking over a tree-lined square at the old nineteenth-century gatehouse with its cupola. I’d have to return there sometime of course. No doubt the gingerhaired fellow would be waiting to pounce. No doubt he’d be planning some new horror, like a Minotaur waiting in the maze. My elation vanished. How could a house dominated by a monster be called home?

The thought soured my feeling for the one place where I ought to feel most myself, where I should feel that I belonged. In a strange sort of way, this sort of thing was exactly why I'd left the Republic. Domestic tyranny.

Now I was furious at myself. I’d had Lang Willem and his little private army in my sights. If my tongue hadn't frozen at the wrong moment, I might have persuaded them to help me with my problem. Fantasies of men who looked like the green-eyed goon I’d seen earlier, kicking the shit out of the intruder, had stormed my mind.

Noticing the lights of a coffee shop nearby, I thought I’d seek some inspiration there. Anyway, it would stave off the moment when I’d have to go home. A blast of Van Halen and dope smoke poured out into the street when I pushed through the door.

‘Easy,’ a voice said.

A familiar face floated into view.

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‘Sparks!’ I said.

‘You shouldn’t push into people, comrade. You never who it might be.’

‘Sorry.’

Sparks ‘Long Time’ Mchunu. Who’d suddenly appear, spend a few days in your company, and then disappear as suddenly as he’d arrived. He was looking well, a little heavier perhaps. His dark face had become rounder.

Marriage was obviously suiting him. As always he was crisply dressed. Pleated trousers, expensive cotton buttonup shirt, gleaming Italian shoes, a leather jacket so soft it looked like you could sleep in it. As usual too the long tongue of his belt hung loose, and he was wearing a woollen beanie despite the warmth of the evening – sartorial touches that went back to his township past.

‘It’s good to see you!’ I said. ‘You’re back in town then.

I was just going to get something to smoke. Want to join me?’

‘Sure,’ said Sparks.

The set of his shoulders suggested that something like this had been his plan anyway. If not with me, then with someone else. That was how he did.

It was only then that I noticed that we were in a coffee shop I disliked, a tourist trap with a steel floor and blue neon lights. The dope prices would be astronomical and the cold drinks little more than coloured water. Typical Sparks – it didn’t matter to him where he smoked or drank. He had money, he could talk to people 36

INCIDENT ON HERON ISLAND

everywhere, even in an over-priced money-magnet like this one.

‘Don’t worry, comrade, I’m paying,’ Sparks said.

That settled, we found a table in the corner. Sparks had bought a pre-rolled hash joint from the hulking longhaired dealer in his alcove. He was in fine fettle and full of plans for the weekend. Coffee shops, bars, nightclubs, movies. The party animal was back.

‘How’s the wife?’ I asked.

‘Fine,’ Sparks said. But even in the dimness of the place I noticed the brief, shifty flick of his eye.

I hadn’t attended the wedding. The marriage had taken place in a country town and I hadn’t been able to afford the train fare. Anyway, I’d convinced myself that being present at the event wouldn’t be appropriate. My relationship with Sparks didn’t involve other people. It was a strictly one-on-one affair.

Now he was keen to catch up on notable events in the lives of mutual acquaintances in the exile community. So far as I could tell at that stage of my acquaintance with the city, the ‘community’ consisted of a bunch of individuals who sometimes got together to talk nostalgically about the country they missed. But anyway, I tried to oblige. The music made it difficult to talk, though, and the stark blue light in the dimness was offputting. We settled into a companionable silence while we passed the joint.

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Not for the first time I thought how remarkable it was that we were here together in this foreign city. For if we shared anything, it was geography. We’d grown up with the same sights, sounds and smells around us: African music, the calls of certain birds, the dry smell of veld grass, meat on fires, red floor polish warmed by the sun.

We were children of the same sensations. All the same, the fact remained that we’d grown up on different sides of a distant railway line. In any other circumstances our disparate origins in a strange society that divided people purely on the basis of the colour of their skin would have made us strangers at best.

I took another puff of the joint. It was tasty. Moroccan hash. The taste of honey and almonds, desert air drifting over the mountains, orange groves in the sun.

‘Good stuff, this.’

Sparks shrug ged. It wasn’t that he was undiscriminating. He liked the best of everything course – booze, hash, clothes and of course, women. But to draw attention to your taste, to broadcast your preferences and draw attention to them? Not him. That would be a lack of style. That might suggest that he was an ignorant fellow who knew nothing of the finer things of life. Food was the only thing he wasn’t fussy about. A meal, for him, was like filling a car at the petrol station.

He’d shovel anything down so long as it had calories. To me, this callousness about one of the holy experiences of life was one of his few failings.

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My eyes drifted to the bar counter on the other side of the café under its futuristic blue light. What was it about this emerging decade, the plastic 1980s that made people want their interiors to look like spaceships? If I was going to pay for the privilege of sitting down somewhere, I’d prefer an organic feel – wooden floors and natural light.

The ranks of bottles reflected in the mirror explained, anyway, why Sparks was there. Scotches, bourbons, vodkas, tequilas, jenevers. Unusually, the place was licensed, a real little one-stop shop of mainstream drugs and stimulants. Someone at city hall must be getting a fortune in pay-offs.

There was a small fridge behind the counter too, I saw that it contained wrapped pies and sandwiches. It would be another week before I’d received my dole; until then I’d be living on bowls of cheap pasta. If Sparks was in the mood for a walk after we’d smoked the joint, I thought he might be persuaded to visit a place up the road that I knew, run by some Egyptians who did a generous shawarma.

‘Hungry, comrade?’ Sparks said, seeing the direction of my gaze.

I knew better than to dissemble. Sparks often seemed to know what I was thinking. The thought of food had set the juices in my stomach curdling. I could feel the chemical reactions down there, like eels threshing in a net. Sparks read my expression and abruptly left the

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table. When he returned he had a wrapped pie for me, as well as several double shots of Scotch for himself.

My mouth had been watering at the thought of the piquant sauces the Egyptians served. Now I pulled the wrapper open, but the pie was soggy and half warm.

Still, I was running on empty, so I tucked in. Meanwhile, Sparks chucked back a whisky. It was as if a light switched on. He looked immediately more pleased with life. To each his vice.

‘Two days, comrade,’ Sparks said.

‘What?’

‘Two days,’ he said again enigmatically. He’d never been one to explain.

He threw back the second scotch and savoured its taste.

His face was friendlier now. As he saw it, ‘letting go’ every so often was a way of staying loyal to your girlfriend. Or wife.

But I didn’t press the issue. From the start an implicit rule had been established in our relationship: we’d never question each other’s choices, never delve into each other’s different backgrounds. That would have divided us. Instead, we’d focus on the present, on the fact that we were in the same little boat in the middle of a vast ocean.

What concrete facts I did know about Sparks were summarised by the contents of an old leather folder that he kept with him when he was on his travels. He worked as some kind of agricultural consultant. On one occasion, he'd been staying with me before flying on to an 40

INCIDENT ON HERON ISLAND

assignment somewhere (Tanzania or Senegal, somewhere like that) and had gone out one evening. I'd decided to sneak a look through his things.

The folder contained: a Standard Six report card from some high school township; a scruffy, thumbed green ID document with the stamps of another era in it; an electrician’s diploma from a technical college, signed in faded violet ink by some official long ago; a certificate of graduation from a military basic training course in Angola; and various diplomas, photographs and reports relating to courses that he’d done in Cuba and East Germany.

The documents were in German and Spanish, but it was clear that intensive training in unarmed combat, weapons, insurgency and counter-intelligence, as well as languages had been involved. Sparks had been a soldier then, in his former life. Apparently he’d been trained to operate ‘behind the lines’ – no doubt to mount attacks on police stations and electrical installations back in the Republic. Nothing in the folder suggested that he’d ever done so.

I thought about all this while I finished the pie. It didn’t make much of a dent.

‘You know, someday I’d like to hear the story of how you got out,’ I continued.

For that was what was whispered about him – that he’d somehow succeeded in climbing the Berlin Wall, and that was how he’d come to the free West.

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‘Out?’ Sparks said.

‘How you climbed the Wall.’

‘Eish!’ Sparks said.

‘Well it’s not something everyone’s done, is it?’

‘I’ve told them that,’ Sparks said. ‘Many times.’

‘Who?’ He looked into his empty glass, and then at the bar.

‘The police,’ he said. ‘Immigration. All those people.

It’s years ago.’

I saw that I’d pushed things too far. Not for the first time, I marvelled that the man should want to keep a great story like that to himself. Me, I’d be dining out on it five nights a week.

‘Well, some day, then.’

‘Yes, comrade, some day,’ Sparks said grumpily. ‘Hey, let’s move.’

I hardly had time to agree. The man was up and out of the place before I could get off my chair. * Outside, on the street again, I stood a moment, breathing the evening air. It was a relief to be out of the postmodern cavern. There’s something about blue light that makes you feel like a lab specimen or a junkie. A glimpse of the gatehouse in the distance reminded me that I’d have to return home later.

It’s the small things, I thought. The scent on a breeze.

The way a seagull launches itself from a gable.

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Sparks was already some way down the road. He was walking toward the gatehouse. Going that way would bring us to my house. I wasn’t ready for that confrontation yet. I lumbered after him, hoping to turn him back in the direction of the Egyptians.

‘You’re in a hurry!’ I puffed.

‘It’s a short life, comrade,’ Sparks replied shortly, still pissed off at my attempt to intrude on his past.

I said nothing. At that pace, I couldn’t spare more breath.

‘Hey buddy, spare a couple guilders?’

A beggar, a German junkie in a long ex-military coat and ragged shoulder-length hair, was blocking our way.

I’d seen him on that street before, working the evening crowds. It was his regular patch. He had a way of getting in your face when he asked for money. Sparks wouldn’t like his brusque approach, I suspected. He was still furious. And so it proved.

‘Buddy?’ he said. ‘Who’s your buddy?’

‘Come on, man, just some change,’ the man said.

Sparks did a sidestep, but the ragged fellow knew that move and sidestepped too.

‘I’m hungry, man,’ he said. ‘Just some change. It doesn’t matter, whatever you got.’

‘Get a job,’ Sparks said. This time his sidestep was more successful.

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‘Hey, fuck you man, I only ask for a few goddamn coins,’ the beggar called after him. ‘What’s the matter with you? Are you stupid or something?’

Sparks stopped in his tracks and turned around.

‘What did you say?’

I saw that it was time to do something, and put a hand on his elbow. ‘Maybe we should go.’

‘Yes, go,’ the junkie yelled, now totally incensed. ‘Go back to Africa where you come from!’

The movement that followed was so quick that afterwards I wasn’t sure that I’d seen it. Sparks seemed to reach up to the man, who was considerably taller than him. The next moment the panhandler was lying on the pavement, socks and sandals splayed, holding a hand to a bleeding nose.

‘Und du,’ Sparks said, ‘gehtst du züruch nach Ostdeutschland, okay?’

Again I had to run after Sparks. ‘Hey, what happened?’

‘Prussians,’ Sparks said. He clicked his tongue – that deeply African expression of disapproval.

Behind us the junkie had shakily picked himself up to stare along the road, one hand at his bloody nose.

‘He might follow us,’ I puffed.

‘I don’t think so.’

It was at this point that I had my second bright idea of the evening. Earlier, I’d been dreaming of gaining the assistance of a private army. Well, clearly one might now

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be available. All I had to do was steer it in the right direction.

‘Where are you staying, Sparks?’ I said. ‘Want to doss at my place tonight?’

But it took two hours of hanging around in the bars along the street to get Sparks to my house. By the time we were finally at the front door, I was in a state of nervous excitement. That racist upstairs would have no idea that the power dynamics had changed. I was really hoping that he would try something. If he did, a surprise revenge would fall on him.

We were in the dark hallway now, the dry floorboards creaking underfoot. There were no lights, of course. The electricity to the house had been cut off years ago.

Peering into the gloom, I listened for the sound of breathing. I could feel Sparks weaving next to me. He was well content. He’d indulged in numerous scotches on the way and enjoyed several long chats with pleasant young ladies in the bars we’d visited. He’d forgotten about his earlier rage at the German junkie. In the dark he chuckled to himself at some pleasing memory.

‘Sshh!’

‘What is it?’ Sparks said.

‘Nothing,’ I lied, still hoping – no, willing – the ginger man to try his luck in the dark.

But we made it up to my room without incident. Rather disappointed, I inserted a key into the huge padlock on

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my door. In another few minutes I had the candles lit and a pot of water warming on the little gas stove.

Sparks settled himself on the mattress by the wall, and looked around the room that was revealed in the flickering light. The remains of layers of paint peeling off the walls. The cracked windows. The tent pitched in the middle of the floor. It was, no doubt, very different to his comfortable, centrally heated house in the countryside.

Meanwhile I waited for the water come to the boil. My little plan hadn’t worked but at least Sparks would be staying over. Maybe we’d run into the ginger-haired fellow in the morning, maybe something would happen then. As for me, it had been a long day. A nice cup of tea and then I’d be pleased to slip into my sleeping bag.

The water was starting to dance in the pan when someone knocked. Still staring at the water, halfmesmerised, I turned the gas down and went to open the door.

A figure stood there in the dark, but it was impossible to see who it was. Then, without warning, a white cloud suddenly erupted in my face. I stumbled back into the room, my eyes stinging terribly. Frantically I felt around for a towel or a dish cloth to wipe my face with. My eyes felt like they’d been tear-gassed.

When I could see again, though still through a curtain of burning tears, I realised that the ginger-haired man was standing in the room with a small fire extinguisher in

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his hand. Sparks, meanwhile, was observing the scene with his arms folded like a bystander.

‘Here’s what I think of people like you,’ the intruder said calmly.

He threw something on the floor. It landed with an ugly, squashy plop. Still wiping my face, I recognised the rightwing flyer that I’d deposited under the man’s door. It contained the copious decoration that I’d added to it.

‘But that’s yours,’ I said. ‘You put it under my door.’

‘Who do you think I am?’ said the ginger-haired man.

Sparks, meanwhile, squatting on his heels, was examining the object with interest.

‘Hey, comrade,’ he said, ‘what is this shit?’

This a free extract from Incident on Heron Island

by Richard Jurgens (Barncott Press 2014), available as an ebook and in print. Full purchasing details are here.

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3. Mystery on the Zeppelin Express One afternoon not long after I’d moved into Alex and Sasha’s place, I settled into an armchair, took a sip of steaming mint tea, and reached for the television remote.

The fridge was stocked and I was freshly showered.

Calmness reigned. Even the cats were sleeping. Normally they acted as if I was plotting to turn them into bedroom slippers.

Pressing buttons idly, I stumbled upon a talk show. A group of intellectuals were agreeing furiously in front of a poster featuring a cartoon granny in a black dress kicking a long-range missile out of the map of Europe.

Politics. Flick. Next was a programme for children, with grown-ups dressed in silly costumes. Flick. Then American professional wrestling – a titanic battle between a man with a red-neck haircut and another with tassels on his leather trousers. Flick. It came down to a choice between reruns of Dallas or of Brideshead Revisited – either good for a peaceful afternoon doze. My finger was hovering on the button when the doorbell rang.

I’d been opening the door to blank-eyed wraiths who got aggressive when I informed them that Alex was away.

Usually they disturbed me at night – the usual stalking time of zombies. During the day it was more likely to be the neighbour, an unemployed fellow in a string vest with 48

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time on his hands, who objected to the cats shitting in his garden. We’d had several unpleasant exchanges on the subject. As if I could do anything. They weren’t my cats.

The buzzer rasped again. Grunting, I struggled out of the armchair and went to open the door.

‘Surprise!’

Large as life, Alex and Sasha were standing on the doorstep, their holiday luggage strewn around their feet.

‘Seen a ghost?’ Alex said.

‘We came back early,’ Sasha added unnecessarily.

Ignoring my hesitation, she planted a kiss on my cheek and stepped past me into the flat. Alex picked up the luggage and followed. Both of them were obviously keen to settle straight away into the familiar comforts of home.

‘Omygod,’ Sasha said from the end of the hallway.

Her progress through the flat was punctuated by a series of Omygods that rose in volume and shrillness.

Alarmed, Alex ran to see what the trouble was.

‘What the fuck!’ I could hear him saying as he followed Sasha around the flat.

I knew the source of their distress immediately of course. But they hadn’t told me they were returning, had they? They hadn’t given me fair warning. I had no affinity with cats, I’d never lived with the creatures. Well, a couple of nights ago I’d given the felines some leftovers of Peking duck, to make friends. They’d gobbled up the five-spiced, MSG-impregnated morsels like there was no

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tomorrow. And Szechuan cuisine, it soon emerged, disagreed with kitty guts. Cat-aclysms had followed.

‘What the fuck, dude,’ said Alex again, emerging from the sitting room, his face red. He stood with his hands on his hips, looking around at the carnage.

Sasha came out of the kitchen with a mop and a bucket. ‘Where are they?’

But she wasn't talking to me. I now occupied a zone of terminal irrelevance so far as she was concerned. She went into the sitting room. There she dislodged the cats from the top of the dresser, where they’d been roosting since their traumatic encounter with the Chinese duck.

They skittered out of the window. Then she went into the kitchen, where she began to swab the floor to the accompaniment of Radio 3. Crashes and bangs followed as furniture was shifted.

Alex felt that he had to satisfy a morbid curiosity. ‘Why didn’t you clean up, man? You know, like a normal person?’

‘The place would have been shining in two weeks,’ I said, as the idyll of my holiday in their flat receded to a remote part of the universe.

‘I can tell you one thing,’ Alex replied. ‘Neither of us is safe around here.’

He reached for his scarf and jacket, which were still lying on his suitcase. Thumping could still be heard in the kitchen. I grabbed my coat from the hook and followed Alex through the front door. He set off along Hoogstraat 50

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as if aiming for an invisible finishing tape. Even at that hour the street was awash with dealers sidling up to us to offer coke, speed, ‘whatever you want boss’. Alex ignored them. Being a player himself, he never bought off the street.

Panting, I asked where we were going, but Alex only pulled his head deeper into his jacket and increased his pace. A few blocks past the red light district he turned along a canal and then through an arch into an alley.

‘Wait here,’ he commanded. And disappeared into a basement further up.

I had plenty of time to observe the street life out there in the cold. The alley was called Gebed Zonder Eind – ‘Endless Prayer’. Hand-painted signs in little windows offered tattoos, crystals, massages, Tibetan spirituality, sexual healing, tarot readings. A parade of hookers, pimps, bouncers, punters, junkies and tourists passed by.

Once all this had seemed exotic, even romantic, now it was just tawdry, like a fairground seen in daylight.

I wondered what I was doing here. Avoiding Sasha’s wrath, certainly. But more generally, what was I doing at all? If I were honest with myself, I couldn’t say. Once I’d looked at these streets with wonder, but that could almost have been another city. And a younger, more naive version of myself.

It was a rather long time before Alex emerged. He set off in the direction of the apartment. We walked even faster on the way back – me tagging along like a boy in 51

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the wake of a grown-up. It was the price of dependence.

I had nowhere else to go.

The flat was gleaming when we returned and smelling strongly of disinfectant. Sasha welcomed her man as if he were a hunter returning from the field. They’d been short of ‘stock’, having been away and Alex, it turned out, had scored an eight-ball. They went straight into the sitting room to ‘chase the dragon’, as the junkie phrase goes. No chance of an evening of TV then. I retired to my cupboard bedroom to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and stayed there until I fell asleep.

I was woken up by a blast of music early the next morning that made the walls of my cupboard bedroom tremble. Alex and Sasha were still winging their way through the starry cosmos. Naturally, they were sharing their backing track with the neighbourhood. Muttering, I got out of bed and heaved my mattress up against the door. The music became a distant rumble, as if it had been squeezed into an old leather suitcase. Sleep, though, wasn’t really an option while my mattress was acting as insulation.

I hadn’t anticipated the demands on my energy that the practical realities of survival in a strange city would make. How could I? The destination is always the end of the journey – until you get there and another one takes its place. Clearly, it was time to move on. I had no idea where to though. Somewhere, anyway. I needed a new level of self-expression. That had been my mission when 52

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I’d moved to this city, after all. But where was the vortex of ideas and feelings, the labyrinth of inspiration and insight? What had happened to the spark of creative life that I’d once sensed in myself ?

I considered going for a walk. But I’d have to get dressed and the streets would be cold and lonely. Then I thought I’d read for a while, but the idea of another man’s Zen wasn’t appealing. It was time, I knew, to face up to my own experience, absurd as it might be. In this house I was being held prisoner by junkies.

Rooting about in my backpack for something to do, I came across a little black notebook. It had been a gift once, in what now seemed like a very distant past. It was bound in silky black leather and contained blank pages of fine paper. I’d mused over it now and then, wondering what to write, but it had always seemed too intimidating to use. Now, while the gods of love rocked in the sitting room, I seized a Biro, and began to make notes.

20 November, 1981 In the underground, there are usually options. A friend will move overseas for a while. He’ll offer his room while he’s away. Or you might be walking somewhere and note that a house that you’ve been eyeing is still unoccupied. And ‘crack’ it. Things come up.

Things always come up.

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But somehow opportunities have dried up recently. Is it me? Have I let my attention, my presentness, slip? Are these psychic doldrums a seasonal thing, like a change of weather? Or am I simply experiencing a temporary glitch in my luck? At any rate, I have no control over anything. Moving to this city was a mistake, but it was the only mistake I could make. And I’ve no idea where I’ll be going next.

Well, here I am, living with two dope fiends.

When I first arrived in this city, I told myself that I’d never indulge in hard drugs. The place is, of course, justly infamous for its ready supplies of heroin, coke, speed. These substances weren’t totally unknown back home either. But they were extra-illegal there, so to say. The penalties for being caught in possession were incredibly stiff. To a nice bourgeois boy, the thought of going to jail in the Republic was terrifying. It certainly kept me away from the shadowed houses of the hardcore merchants. The harder the drug, the harder you fall.

Well, things are different here. The police must know that Alex is a dealer, and that Sasha bobs in his wake like a loyal little bumboat.

And then there’s the constant trail of late-night freaks to their door. But somehow they carry 54

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on their little business undisturbed. Maybe they’re tolerated as middle-class people with a bad habit. Maybe the idea is that they’re just going through a phase, that they’ll come to their senses one day and kick it.

Pausing to think, I became aware of the din beyond the insulation of the mattress. Still Led Zeppelin: ‘Communication Breakdown’. And that immortal rhyme: doin’ and ruin. * The following morning I found Alex enjoying a cup of coffee and a foul-smelling hand-rolled cigarette in the kitchen. Sasha was curled up on her chair, suffering a bout of post-dragon ennui no doubt.

Joining them at the table, I poured myself a cup of tea and had a slice of toast. Nothing was said about yesterday. Which was a relief. That’s the thing about depression. You don’t give a shit. Literally, as I’d proved.

Hopefully, they’d understand.

Instead, they talked about their trip. They’d liked Istanbul. The pazars, the coffee shops where a hookah preloaded with rose- scented tobacco came with the price of a cup of coffee, the shambolic neighbourhoods, the muezzins’ voices echoing in the sunlit squares as they called the faithful to prayer. But apparently the city swarmed with swarthy, corrupt-looking men straight out 55

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of the worst bits of Midnight Express. A Western addict stuck out there like a sore thumb. You couldn’t safely score.

Aside from this, they’d also been affronted by the poverty they saw everwhere. Ramshackle dwellings, kids in rags playing unattended in the streets, crippled peddlers selling unwanted wares. Sights like these made it difficult to enjoy a peaceful holiday.

I’d encountered sentiments of this kind before.

Europeans often feel that the rest of the world should be more like them, that poverty should be kept neatly out of sight. I thought with longing of my tiny room. But Alex’s intensity held me fixed in my seat like a Startrek tractor beam.

‘Well, it’s not as if you could have done anything about the situation,’ I said.

This was the thing, Alex replied, getting alarmingly enthusiastic. There was something one, you, we could do about it. There was always something, you, we could do about it. That was another reason they’d cut short their holiday. There was to be a big march in Amsterdam today, they’d learned. Historic. And they’d come back to be a part of it.

I was puzzled. I hadn’t heard anything about any march. Or, for that matter, anything about history. But then, until last night I’d imagined that I was on holiday.

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‘They’re going to march against the missiles that the Americans want to put in our country,’ said Alex slowly, as if explaining a problem of Euclid to a dim schoolboy.

‘Oh. Right.’

‘You should come with us.’

‘Sure,’ I said.

As soon as I decently could, I beat a retreat to my cupboard bedroom. At some stage I’d have to accept the fact that I shared the world with other people, that my solitude was gone. But people were so draining. Lying down in my remade bed, I seized the black notebook.

21 November, 1981 Yesterday I encountered an interesting passage in a book I’m reading.

‘The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test. If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.’

Well, I don’t have a motorcycle. And I’ll never have one. But that’s not the point. The guy writes about the care that goes into looking after a motorbike, sure, but the machine is just a metaphor. The ‘machine’, in fact, is your life. And that gets me thinking. All I have, now, is myself. Nothing else. But what is my self, my ‘machine’?

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It’s taken all these years to realise that you can’t just go somewhere and start again. You can never really leave home; you always take it with you. Even at ‘home’ you’ll run straight into the same problem. As the guy says: ‘The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.’ But what sort of consolation is that? If you haven’t brought any Zen, I mean.

So maybe I’m getting closer to understanding Alex and Sasha. How I’d like some relief, however temporary, from this state of suspension, this condition of total uncertainty.

Is it only the shocking awareness of one’s impermanence that will spark a desire for change? * When I woke, several hours later, I was sweating and my heart was pounding. I’d had a strange dream in which I was in a zeppelin of some kind, flying among white clouds. But it soon dissolved, as dreams do. I needed a cup of tea and perhaps another, more substantial breakfast. Then I recalled the strained atmosphere at the table earlier. It might be good, I thought, to make myself useful.

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In the sitting room I found Alex and Sasha slumped in front of the TV. Out there, people were filling the streets and the squares. The city was awash with humanity.

There were banners everywhere. BAN THE MISSILES! NO NUKES ON OUR SOIL! Huddled in a winter coat, a commentator was informing his audience of something but the TV’s volume was turned down and it wasn’t possible to hear what he was saying. Notables from a wide range of organisations, it seemed, were scrambling to get on to the podium. Soon there would be speeches. The mood was oddly festive. The revolution would be televised after all.

I swept one of the cats out of an armchair and sat down. The animal gave me a green-eyed stare and flounced off.

‘Weren’t you supposed to be there?’ I said.

Alex and Sasha looked at each other.

‘It’s not too late,’ I continued. ‘You could be there in ten minutes.’

Actually, I was only thinking of the solitude I’d enjoy if they went out, but at least the question had been raised in their minds. Could they get through those crowded streets and make it for the speeches in time? They looked at each other. No. Instead, Sasha brought out her supply of dope, which she kept in a plastic pencil case, and began preparing a hit. But she was high and clumsy, so Alex impatiently took over the task. Tearing a square of tinfoil, he poured 59

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a little heap of powder into it, over which he squeezed some lemon juice to make a paste. Then he applied a lighter flame to the underside of the tinfoil and held his nose over the greasy smoke that rose up, drawing in an eager lungful. When he was done, he repeated the exercise for Sasha. From the distance of a nonparticipant the smoke smelled repugnant: like burning paint or plastic – some sort of chemical accident.

‘Beautiful,’ Alex said, his eyes streaming as he glanced at the parade of history passing by on the TV. The vast crowd was cheering the arrival of one of the speakers.

‘Man, that’s people power.’

‘What happened to changing the world?’ I said.

‘There’re so many people there already,’ Alex said.

‘Look!’

He got another round going and took a hit of dragon smoke. Then, to my surprise, he offered me the reeking square of silver paper. I drew back primly, like a governess rejecting an improper suggestion. Alex shrugged and took another hit.

On the television, the speeches were beginning. The massive crowd had settled into stillness. Banners were whipping in the chilly wind.

‘Well, maybe I’ll make breakfast, then,’ I said. ‘A good meal makes up for many woes, as my granny used to say.

Bacon and eggs, fried tomato, lashings of toast.’

‘Not in my kitchen,’ Sasha said.

‘I was just trying to help.’

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‘You know how you can help,’ she said, giving me an intent stare before she turned her attention back to the TV. What’s with her? I wondered. She’d been friendly enough earlier. Maybe my suggestion that they attend the rally had annoyed her. Maybe she just wanted me out of their place so they could get high in peace – when ‘out’, for me, meant life on the street. If it had been possible, I’d have nuked her right where she lay on her comfortable sofa.

Alex and I had been friends before she’d appeared in his life. I’d visited him at his first-floor walk-up on the dim, grim street where he’d lived long before she’d appeared on the scene. We’d get goofed, talk all kinds of shit. Sometimes we’d go out to gigs. Alex had opened the city to me in ways that I’d never otherwise have discovered: Einstürzende Neubauten, Jesus and the GospelFuckers, Crass, The Angelic Upstarts, The Ex. And then one day he’d shown up at the squat on the Haarlemmerplein, where I was living at the time, urgently needing a place to stay.

Get that, bitch? I thought. Urgently needing a place to stay. Alex and me, we go back in this city.

Alex chose that moment to sit up. ‘You know what, I’m hungry,’ he said.

‘Ten minutes,’ I said.

Yoko wasn’t going to break up the band this time. My weapon would be her kitchen. I got up to put on an 61

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apron. Preparing the breakfast took longer than I expected but at last I produced three perfect plates of fryup. I couldn’t wait to sit down and get my fangs into that bacon. Illicit as it was, this Jewish boy was far from home.

When I brought the plates through, though, I found Alex and Sasha slumped in depression. The speeches on the box were over. The crowds of that historic day were dispersing. The VIPs had had their say, everyone was going home. It looked very cold out there.

‘Food’s ready,’ I said brightly. Sasha gave me another of her sharp looks. For a moment, I saw myself exactly as she saw me.

‘Dude, let’s go for a walk,’ Alex said wearily.

I looked hungrily at the eggs, the wedges of crisp bacon, the fried tomato melting on the plate.

‘Now?’ ‘Now.’ * When we were on the street, Alex set off at breakneck speed again down Hoogstraat. I wanted to know where we were going, but I was soon too out of breath to talk.

We followed the curve of the canal to the Westerkerk and turned right behind the palace. Coming out into the open square with its phallic white marble war memorial, we ran into a hostile wind that felt as if it was blowing straight from Siberia. Drawing breath was like inhaling

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daggers of ice. I had to stop in the long shadow of the Hotel Krasnapolsky to rest.

‘You should get outside more frequently,’ Alex said, looking at my belly. ‘You need movement.’

I consulted the Babel fish. Alex’s English wasn’t always quite on the button, the nose, whatever. Oh, right: ‘exercise’. Well, people had been telling me this all my life, I wasn’t going to start listening now. Anyway, it had to be some kind of world-record-breaking irony – a junkie handing out health lectures.

We turned a corner on a narrow canal. The neon lights of cafés and sex shops glinted dully in the still, thick water of a grey November dusk. Despite the cold, the streets were thronged with tourists rubbernecking at the near-naked girls in the windows. Dubious-looking individuals hung around on the bridges. There was trash everywhere and the smell of cheap thrills was overwhelming. It was mind-boggling, when you really thought about it: how much fluid had been ejaculated, ejected or consumed in this seventeenth-century district.

It was probably the most piss, beer, vomit and spermdrenched square mile on the planet.

Alex turned abruptly into an alley lined on both sides with red-lit sex kiosks. Most of the curtains were closed – the girls doing good business. We passed a couple of cops in blue uniforms who were enjoying a chat with a blonde; standing in her doorway, she was adjusting the strap of her minute red bikini.

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‘How’s things, love?’ I heard one of the cops saying in the city dialect as we passed. ‘The cold snap isn’t putting off the customers I see.’

Aside from the litter and the stench, the red-light district at night was more like a film set than reality. A remake of Irma la Douce maybe. Or an adult theme park, with real girls and live fucky-fucky onstage. But we were soon in a darker neighbourhood, away from the welltrodden and well-lit tourist streets. I was beginning to feel nervous when Alex stopped at an iron gate that led to a side alley. There was no bell to ring that I could see.

‘Why are we here?’ I said, looking around with some apprehension.

‘You'll see,’ said Alex.

A young Chinese man appeared from the shadows behind the iron gate. Seeing Alex, he unlocked without comment and let us in. Then he locked the gate again and led us along a series of dark passages. The way was lit by a few slivers of light that slanted from apartment windows. Left alone in that maze, I knew I’d never have found my way out again. I was aware that Alex was ahead of me only because I bumped into him.

We came to small courtyard that was just visible in the dim glow of a lamp above a door. Alex was clearly familiar with the routines of this hidden world. He raised his arms and allowed himself to be frisked. I baulked, but Alex shook his head, and I had to submit to the sensation of strange hands running over my body. The ritual was 64

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soon over. The young man knocked on a door that was at the top of a short flight of steps. After a while it opened to reveal a stiff-faced old woman in a faded smock of black and gold.

‘Mr Alex, long time,’ she said.

She led us into a dim room with a number of candle-lit alcoves, each equipped with some low couches. I noticed lacquered scenes celebrating the sublimity of nature.

Which in that place seemed very far away. In a corner, a bronze life-size Buddha meditated inscrutably in a circle of candles, his hands resting with open palms on his knees, his feet surrounded by lotus petals. We’d timewarped to another continent, another century.

Like a maître d’ showing a couple of diners to a table, the old lady indicated one of the alcoves. Alex removed his shoes and lay down. Looking around, I noted that the other couches were occupied by people who might have been sleeping, except for the glint of candlelight on their immobile eyes.

‘Is this place what I think it is?’ I said, my hands on my hips. I felt quite indignant.

Alex was making himself comfortable on his couch, as if getting ready for a home movie. His pillow, which had a bow-like depression to support the neck, reminded me of a carved African headrest, except that it was upholstered and embroidered.

‘Lie down,’ he said. ‘You’ll enjoy it.’

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Something, some sort of fate or synchronicity had brought me here, I realised. There was no point in further resistance. I removed my shoes and lay down. The Buddha smiled at me from the shadows flickering in the corner.

‘I thought you were going to ask me to leave,’ I said. A sort of peace, or resignation, was settling over me.

‘No, I want to explain something to you,’ Alex said.

‘What?’

‘Why you should stop judging us.’

The old lady held out a long-stemmed clay pipe.

‘Take it,’ said Alex. ‘When you understand, we’ll talk.

Deal?’

I put the pipe to my mouth. The crone applied a flame on a taper to the bowl with a ritualistic gesture. And for the record, this is what I experienced.

27 November, 1981 I was flying through clouds, a blue sky, in bright sunlight. It was very quiet except for the wind whistling in the rigging. We were in a gondola. It was hanging from the underside of a huge zeppelin that was visible through a glass ceiling.

The canvas panels of the zeppelin were painted in bright colours – cerise, blue, green, yellow. The gondola, though as large as a railway carriage, was made of finely-wrought 66

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basketwork. There was a sumptuous bar to one side with great brass beer taps, attended by an impressive-looking gent with sleeve garters and a handlebar moustache.

I caught a glimpse of myself in a large mirror. I was dressed in Victorian khaki, including pith helmet. I was aware that I was here to investigate something, but I didn’t know what. Mystery on the Zeppelin Express.

At the other end of the gondola was a viewing gallery. From there I could see the airship’s engines. They were strange contraptions of cogs and flywheels and chains and shiny interconnecting levers that cranked propellers shaped like the sails of windmills.

The transparent canvas of the sails shimmered like dragonfly wings in the sunlight.

Alex was standing with a group of welldressed people in the viewing gallery. He was wearing a worn blue corduroy jacket and a little black peaked cap of the kind favoured by Rhine barge captains. Sasha was wearing the heavy make-up and the little tilted hat of a 1950s KLM air hostess. For some reason their uniforms conferred authority. She beckoned to me. I went over to the porthole where she was standing. Below us the clouds were parting and

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we were afforded a view of the land over which we were silently drifting.

Africa. Savannah. Wildlife trails, herds of wildebeest on the rolling green plain, baobab trees. Then a village of thatched huts, children in ragged clothing running out on the hard red rectangle that passed as their football field, waving at the passing airship. Then townships of tiny iron shanties huddled against each other, thousands and thousands of them. Then suburbs of houses, each with its green garden and blue swimming pool. And then that familiar high-rise skyline, jagged as a newspaper graphic in turbulent times.

Johannesburg. My hometown. I was intensely moved. The strange thing was that for the first time in my life I knew some sort of certainty. ‘Do you understand?’ said Alex, the zeppelin captain.

A few days later, my luck changed. So it went. Out of the blue, I was offered an attic room in another part of town. Rent-free too.

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This a free extract from Incident on Heron Island

by Richard Jurgens (Barncott Press 2014), available as an ebook and in print. Full purchasing details are here.

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About the Author Richard Jurgens was born in Johannesburg in 1960. His memoir of his years with the ANC in the frontline states of southern Africa was published in 2000.

With an American partner, he was a co-founder of Amsterdam Weekly, an award-winning alternative publication, in 2003. A book of his poems, ‘One Summer’ (Blackbird, Amsterdam, 2010) is now also available as an ebook (Barncott Press, 2012). The Incident on Heron Island is his first novel. The script of his caper film, The Joburg Job, is due to be published with Barncott.

He is presently completing The Chipre Accord, a second volume of poetry. A poet, writer, editor, journalist and translator, he is now based in Johannesburg.

BARNCOTT PRESS

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