Chipboard

When it came, it came from all sides.

It had been a hazy few days, but the man on the radio said that there was a cold front coming in. It would clear out the sky – make it easier for Sonali to breath. “A cold front.” Standing at the window, I imagined it hanging out there off the coast, a big chunk of difference, waiting to sweep in on us. It would be such a relief.

Our house is at the bend of the asphalt road, mid way down the hill that leads to the refineries. The stacks tower over the houses, and from my point on the hill I can see better than most the in and outs that kept those places going. Tankers trucks in, Tanker trucks out, little bodies moving to and fro -- popping in and out of buildings that looked more like complicate knots of steel piping wrapped around chunks of concrete. All kinds of stuff comes out of those stacks. Particularly at night, when they think everyone is sleeping.

But how could you sleep through that smell?

You’d get up to close the windows, breathing shallow to keep out the stink. Sometimes you’d see towers of flame burning up high into the night from one of the flare stacks. Other nights you’d see nothing – nothing to explain Sonali coughing herself awake, skin damp and warm. The refineries hulked their, rooted among all the houses, but gave no sign. It would be a relief when that cold front came it, that big chunk of information they said was out there, about to become real and freshen things up for a few days at least.

I like to listen to the weather. I study it a bit you know, in my spare time. My trade is tiling, and a bit of plaster work now and then, but I would have like to be a weather man. Knowing about all those systems inside of systems – getting to spend your days looking into what nature has planed for us.

But there are plans, you know, and then there is delivery. They don’t always match up, you don’t always get what you are supposed to. We fight about that, We, here, the people in the Refinery Basin. Just the other day we met to talk. Still the City hasn’t given us their Disaster plans: things we should know for the next time a plant catches on fire. Like in the Fall – hit by lightening.

Imagine.

It burnt for four days.

“There is a plan,” they told us “there is a Plan,” but we haven’t seen it.

The cold front blew in just after dinner. Cool, fresh, soothing to breath. Then the lightening started. Aish! So much lightening, my boy, I have never seen. And thunder, real quick, so you know the storm is right above you. It was like it ripped open the sky and the water came down. Came down in sheets, in bricks, in blocks. Waves of rain. The road became a river that burst its banks at the corner above our house. Instead of following the asphalt to the right, it rushed on straight, over the embankment and down straight into our yard.

I have never seen so much water. Our neighbours car got lifted up and moved so that its front wheels hung over the edge of the embankment down onto our lot. All the while the wind coming in from the ocean whipped the rain up against the other side of the house. It seemed to come from all sides.

We ran around Sonali and I, closing up all the windows. Wedging towels under the doors to block the water that had already started to rise towards their thresholds. And then we sat. What more can you do? We sat holding each other without even thinking of it, touching by instinct and listened to rain like cattle’s hooves on the roof.

Our place isn’t big you know, a living room, bedroom, kitchen and a little room – almost a closet really, where we can do washing and with a door that opens out onto our small yard. Sitting on the couch we could see into the other three rooms: door frames and the outlines of a bed, the kitchen table where I had eaten breakfast that morning , a deep stand-alone sink made of scuffed white plastic. We held each other under the thunder and watched. Watched everything in the house not moving, watched the towel under the door grow dark with water. I remember that– the water seemed to creep into that towel so quietly. If you looked at it all the other noises faded away and there was nothing but a creeping.

Then a crash. The side door burst open in a flood of muddy water with an old tire leading the edge, rolling and toppling over on itself just inside the kitchen. A hollow splash. Muck and garbage seemed to be everywhere spreading out like a fan from the kitchen, covering our feet before we had even moved from the couch. “Gav, we have to leave!” Sonali, in her faded floral nightgown pulling me up, almost wading through the mud and water and garbage that kept coming. All the trash that we had been after the council to pick up all these months, now in my living room! “Gav! We must go to the Govenders, we must go!” I realized that I was still standing only a few steps from the couch. Under the thunder, muddy water rising up well above my ankles.

The Govenders live up and across the road from us. They had a bigger house, built above the garage for their car, their car which they always parked in the driveway anyway because Nirmala didn’t like reversing in. Their car… which now hung precariously off the embankement above where Sonali’s hibiscus bush. It’s front wheels had gone over, hanging in space, and it was only the undercarriage caught on the curb that stopped it from being pushed further. We were standing, the front door open. Sonali holding my arm guiding me out through the water. We manoeuvred somehow from house to path, clinging to the railing as we waded up the stairs by our driveway and across the street.

In the dark, between flashes of lightening, you could feel what seemed to be the whole hill being washed down between our feet, lapping up against your calves.

We spent the night there, at the Govenders. Their roof was leaking heavily in one corner but other than that they were fine. Two other families came from down the hill – like us looking for shelter. We talked for a while all of us, the families, the children the parents, until we began to fade with fatigue and Nira helped set us up to sleep in the living room on the overstuffed furniture. She ran out of blankets, and pulled out clean towels for the rest of us.

The morning came with sun. Sunshine on the mess that lay covering the street. Mud more than a foot deep. Rafts of garbage built up behind larger pieces, tires, a bucket, an overturned baby carriage whose handles had gotten snagged in a fence. We walked back over, refusing tea, wanting to see what was waiting for us. Walking into the house the ground didn’t change, mud and rocks, sticks and garbage uneven underfoot. The inside, the out – what difference now?

At first it looked like shovelling was all we would need to do. Shovelling and then mopping. Nothing too bad. But then we noticed the swelling. The water had seeped into the furniture. It was old chipboard stuff that we had bought cheap and repainted one afternoon. The water had wicked its way up through the particles of wood, dissolving the glue. The bookcase we noticed first because it had begun to sag under the weight of the books. But it was everything, whatever we would touch would wobble and split. All of it retuning back into the muck it had been made from. The only thing that survived was the kitchen table and chairs - metal those ones. Sighing in desperation as she saw how the side of our cupboard had swelled and softened from the water she sat on our bed and that too gave out beneath her.

“Gav, Gav, why is this happening like this? Everything, everything…”

Sonali sat, head in her hands leaning with the angle of the bedframe that was supported now only by the headboard. Her breathing was ragged so I reached for her medicing but she pushed it away with a flick sending the pump skittering along the top of the bedside table.

I started to say something, I don’t know what, about the emergency plan, and blocked storm drains, the lack of proper maintenance that we’d talked about at the meeting, weather systems…

“Systems,” she said “Yes, but not weather. These things were built to collapse Gav. Built from the dust of the lumber processing plant down the hill that makes its profit by taking all the garbage that it produces and selling it all squeezed together with glue. Sell it as if it was something…”

Her words hung there for a moment and she pushed long strands of black hair from her forehead, tucking them feroscioulsy behind her ear. Looking at me with eyes that burned.

“This whole place Gav, our houses, my breathing, those refineries down there … that’s the system, the system of making nothing from something. Grinding up good wood to make paper for hamburger wrappers in Europe, or China and then pushing the garbage on people who have no other choice, nowhere else to go. All these things are beginning to seem the same, that we see only smokestacks from our windows, the smells at night, the city with no plans for us… Maybe to you these things all seem separate Gav, but I can’t tell them apart anymore.

In a month we will be back to living, the cleaning done, new furniture found … a dinner to that the neighbours for that night, ‘remember,’ we’ll say “when there was all that rain.’ We’ll make our like here like people make there lives anywhere.

But nothing will have changed – no matter how much love we put into this place Gav, no matter how much, we’ll still be in it, the system that needs people like us to take it when the rain comes down.”

Mandela and the Girls play in Traffic

It didn’t come as much of a surprise. We are all so used to having our heroes brought low; finding out Mandela wasn’t the great leader he’d thought didn’t have all that much of an effect on him. He’d been here, in the rain of South African spring, for two weeks now and every morning the paper had new stories of corruption at one level or another of the government. The head of the national security force had been suspended by the president, with no clear charge. The health minister, all smiles and lacquered black curls, had shrugged off claims that she had stolen from her hospital and her patients, stolen from the sick, when she was a nurse so many years ago. She had shrugged them off, and now was still shrugging her shoulders about AIDS -- garlic and showers, that was her prescription.

My God, was this woman crazy!

The next in line for power in the ANC also seemed within a finger’s length of serious corruption charges -- which didn’t seem to affect his prospects for power.

It had to have gotten like this somehow. So much corruption doesn’t spring up all in one piece from one day to the next.

So it wasn’t such a surprise in the end, to find out Mandela wasn’t the man everyone made him out to be. He stood for something. Something wonderful. But in the end he hadn’t been able to protect it from his own party, and the hunger for power and control of the people that ran it, and ran into his place once he was gone. It’s important to have symbols though, and maybe one day memories of his smiling face would help bring some kind of change.

The wind picked up, tossing around the chuffed fronds dropped by the palms -- as big as a boy, big leaves here in Africa. As big as a boy.

There is a family that lives near the intersection on the way to the center of town. The oldest often has his youngest sister hammocked onto his back in a beige towel, worn but clean. All in all there are five of them. Four kids and their mother. I haven’t seen the father. They probably haven’t either, not for a long while. Assuming there is one -- and not two… Africa is hard on her mothers.

The two girls, 7 and 8, run out into traffic while it is stopped at the light. Smiling and laughing at each other, one with a sign lettered with a bic on tattered brown cardboard that is showing its ribs, beige masking on one corner. Looking mischievously at us through the window she holds it up - backwards. Her sister laughs and she flips it around. But by then they are back to their conversation, she missed her moment. Opening her little mouth wide she begins to chant “donation… donation please… do..na..tion!” her red tongue darting out with every ’a’. The clean green Volkswagen pulls away and she darts back to her sister on the median. They resume a game, playing round the post of the traffic light. And briefly he felt a keen sense that he was living in their memories, his car a green speck in a landscape they would look back on. And he wanted very much to know where they were at this moment, where they were sitting when they remembered this day: Giving and taking - throwing their laughter back and forth at each other - brown eyes shining underneath the grey sky, streams of traffic flowing all around them.