Another Alex night roster. Distinctive mix of smells : warm, drying blood on faces, clothes, stickiness and sweaty duskiness; alcohol on the breath. Raw and regurgitated, time and again – characteristically unforgettable.

Working in the emergency room, suturing and repairing ripped and invaded flesh; blood oozing, dripping, spots on the floor, slowly drying and transforming from bright red (have you seen how brilliantly crimson fresh blood can be?), to a dark plasticky brown…

Down the road the hostels – massive hexagons in a sea of tiny hovels and shacks which made do, and still do, as homes. The huge dormitories for migrant men and women, separately housed, incubating and accelerating HIV. Migrant workers, coming to Johannesburg to take something home, cash and disease, for their families in villages across the subcontinent. Workers, on their own, but together with others, in the hostels and shebeens - intoxication and violence and HIV - as they tackle the challenges of Johannesburg.

David Goldblatt’s photographs of men on concrete bunks, a cooking pot to the side, chimney at middle… Like those pictures of Jews in concentration camp bunks, row after row, faces peering, concrete, cold, full of people, but empty. The concentration camp pictures with gaunt faces, stripey prison pyjama clothes, gaunt, gaunt faces, hollow hollow cheeks, big big eyes, dark dark. Black shiney faces, different, engaging with life, not the resignation of the camps.

Flight of ideas. One thought engenders another – somewhere somewhat lateral, but equally compelling. Then back again to where we started.

Walking around Crown Mines, the old deserted Shaft 16. Gold was mined there. Fortunes made. Lives lost.

On our doorstep – the huge mining compound and then a string of eight houses for the mine managers. The dormitories had room after room of concrete bunks, was it eight to a room, 12 or 16? Wall graffiti: who was there? When? Where from? Single words of resistance, of challenge, of vulnerability. Old Crown Mine homes, the managers overseeing a forced labour system, homes overlooking acres of tall-growing wispy grasses, Johannesburg in the distance.

A digression... manager houses transformed into student communes. [Remember the vegetable cooperative – Sunday mornings sorting boxes of aubergines, tomatoes, potatoes, sacks of beans and mealies, and carrots, sweet smelling, boxes of fruits, melons, apples, pears, all the basics and then a treat – maybe mangoes, coconuts, litchis... there was always supposed to be a treat, well priced but special… dates, avocados, dried apricots… simple pleasures]

Back to our house.. wild grasses outside, mess inside (I remember a friend saying ‘at some point you have to ask yourself – am I a person or a … pig’ – no answer), next door a young medic and his wife. In the middle of the night, shouting outside, a loud crackle.

Strange how gunshots crackle –

they don’t

bang .. !!

bang…!!

like you’d imagine.

The crackle of machine gun fire – even more weird because it sounds like nothing else. I remember the sound of it sitting in a park in Pristina, Kosovo, chilled to the bone, anxious, wondering whose life had ended nearby. Crackling, strange sound, unmistakable once you have heard it once. Terrifyingly close … I learned later it was a wedding celebration…. Shooting into the air, in the streets, jubilation abounding.

Even then as I sat in a park in Pristina, I wondered about those last walks in the forest, like in Naryshkin Park, where lovers and families gathered but later on were mown down and buried in a mass grave. There would have been crackles then, too. And family members lost...

I looked out the window – there was my neighbour outside, standing under one of the few street lamps lighting up the long road to our eight homes. He was looking out into the grass. I went outside.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Someone was trying to break in” he said. “We heard noises at the door downstairs. I grabbed my gun, dashed down, and started shouting.”

“And then?” I asked as he kept talking, breathless, panting.

Sweating … I could see it glow on his brow even in that low night lit-up light.

“I ran outside, and saw somebody running into the long grass over there”, he pointed in front of us to where the grasses stretched beyond the lamplights and blended into the darkness.

Further in the distance the road lights, way further. Down the hill to a so-called Coloured area, where as students we ran a clinic. Why didn’t the state provide proper services, instead of us do-gooders trying to fill holes of need with good-will. It was much the same in Muldersdrif, peri-urban area, student run clinic, seeking to meet needs of farmworkers and their children. From my first year as a student I used to do the penicillin jabs for syphilis, injections in a small cubicle, hand over hip-bone, under the fleshy part of your palm, rub of alcohol swab, needle deep in, penicillin discharged. Syphilis was common… the queue, long.

He was talking faster, becoming a little breathless, faster, sweat gleaming on his face in the lamplight, standing there in his cotton pyjamas and I in my gown, nothing underneath. “I held my gun up and shot in his direction”.

I hadn’t known he had a small gun he kept at home. Why? I didn’t know. I couldn’t connect a commitment to health with keeping a gun. Some years later, in East Timor, the Australian army medics kept semi-automatic weapons with them, in the ward, a converted huge hall, now a youth-artist colony. Is congruence necessary? How often do we find contradictions and contradistinction, ethics and morality intertwined with their opposites?

“He’ll be out of here” I said, “Must be terrified. Scarey. Go to bed. I’m off to sleep, see you”. Into the house, peering out into the darkness. Up the stairs, looking out the window again, to where the grasses merged with the dark dark black, out there. Into bed, a moment of restlessness, turn over, shuffle the pillow, my limbs, the sheets… and drifted into the night.

Next morning... further commotion.

An ambulance, white with a big red cross, and a police vehicle, the typical white Toyota with its GG (Government Garage) number-plate. Reminds me of another Shaft 16 white Toyota story, presumed to be the police.

My friend, a medical student, had been banned by the South Africa regime. He’d earlier been detained with a young teacher friend of his, Ahmed Timol, accused of plotting against the apartheid state. They were detained, interrogated and tortured at John Vorster Square, the giant police station, alongside the highway, stretched across the western side of town. I always wondered why nobody had bazooka’d it and then made a hasty getaway along the roads stretching South to Soweto, west to Randburg, East to Germiston or back into the city. His friend Ahmed Timol and he would cross paths occasionally in the grey celled corridors, no talk permitted.

The torture went on, until he was released. An order restraining the police had been issued, they had overstepped their mandate, gone beyond instilling fear, terror and extracting information. It was just after the newspapers had carried the story of Ahmed Timol, teacher and detainee accused of plotting against the state, found dead, on the streets below John Vorster Square.

They said he had jumped from the tenth floor. Strange, though that he had been in a cell with barred windows, locked door, no escape, alone aside from the terror. Strange how he could have jumped from that closed in, closed up, space.

My friend was released but still banned. Even now his records remain, testimony to torture and abuse.

Banned. You wouldn’t know what that means… not allowed to be with more than one person at a time. Unable to be in a public place, a crowd… forbidden from talking politics, writing about politics, even thinking about a different future... He’d been a thinker, well-read and well-versed in politics. Our reading group, three friends, DP and CG, and me, meeting regularly out at Crown Mines with Salim, our friend and teacher, out at Shaft 16, where surveillance was presumed less likely, the violence of the state less suffocating, the banning order less visible.

We’d meet to learn – medical students seeking to understand our fragmented South Africa and how change occurs: ploughing through revolutionary thought, political economy, Marx and Engels, development studies, a small reading group to inform and contextualise a struggle looming large. We’d meet every now and then – in our lounge, a large room, ground floor, relaxingly dusty and dusky, far away from the noise and bustle of Johannesburg.

Until one day we saw, through the window, in the distance, a white Toyota coming up the road. They always drove white Toyotas… it was the vehicle of the police, the SAP, the regime.

He startled, “We need to get out of here”, jolting up before any of us had even seen the car approaching.

“What’s wrong?” jumping up and looking out, immediately seeing the white car approaching. Not much else needed to be said.

“Where can we go?” he implored, already half way up the stairs. “If they find I’ve broken my banning order they can put me back inside” he said. “Where can we hide?” now on the landing at the top.

“Come… here” we dashed up.

There were the usual far too-obvious places, under the bed, in the bathroom, in the washing basket? No inbuilt cupboards, no secret doors. I strained against the window, old frames, paint crusty and encrusted, slightly stiff but then … it slid up.

“Get onto the roof, they won’t look there.” He was already out before I continued, “They can’t see this side of the roof from the street. And you can’t see it from the window”.

We stumbled onto the red tiled roof, it crunched under us. I slid the window down again. We crouched, moving slowly towards the chimney stack. The car was now just beyond the thorn bush at the edge of the garden at the edge of the houses at Shaft 16 (we were the first house in the string of eight), at the edge of the city.

Salim was terrified, sweating, gasping with anxiety. Who knows what he was reliving… before… inside.

The car came closer and stopped. A white Toyota. Standard government issue.

In each of our minds unspoken disaster – however we saw it, the common threads were the police pounding on the door, the dogs rushing and barking, unleashed, … Forced entry to look for a criminal – a banned person, talking with friends, revolution confirmed by incriminating literature, friends’ names in a diary, damning us but mostly damning him, opening a search for more incriminating evidence. Anything could be found, anything could be turned into a plot. Pot too. No challenge; nobody to answer to.

The white Toyota outside.

Each of us thumping, inside.

Sweating, pounding like the sound of manganese being hammered off a person-sized metal sheet placed in a tiny cubicle in a hazardous factory. The most horrific workplace I’d come across … another story for another time …

The white car … it started moving again, stopping further down the lane, sweat pouring, drenched, mouth dry, parched…

The car pulled up, parked, and a young man, wearing jeans and a t-shirt got out, and entered one of our neighbours (never got to know them, they were not a student house) down the lane.

Salim started sobbing, crying, sobbing, sobbing, still on the roof. Sobbing, loud, guttural, deep sobs… not crying sobbing, sobbing, deep deep down.

An hour later, still on the roof, talking quietly, lots of silences, talking slowly, hands held, comforting one another. Beneath the sobs, he decided there and then to leave, to abandon his medical studies, to go into exile, to get away from it all. Which he subsequently did.

But not before the white Toyota got going again and drove back down the lane, away from Shaft 16, heading back to the City.

… back to where we left off…

… back to the ambulance …

… back to the police vehicle at the roadside outside the house.

Just a short distance from where that white Toyota had stopped.

A body had been found, a small spat of blood on his khaki shirted chest, a small hole in the skin, a pale lifeless, cool, corpse, testimony to the punctuation in the night’s silence. Warming up as the sun rose, the day heating, brightening… Flies buzzing, around him, around us. All involved.

My friend was being asked what happened, what did he do… he explained and said I’d been there with him just afterwards. Nobody asked me. There was no dispute, another life lost to crime, in a land of plenty and inequality.

No more questions asked, no calling to account, no explanation for a family shredded by that night sound.

Those mine hostels…

Alexandra, on the edge of Sandton, probably the wealthiest area in Africa, where some of the homes, with their gardens, could swallow the hundred and fifty thousand in Alex without much difficulty.

For the workers, another night was time to get ready for the next day, bed down and carry on. Saturday nights and paydays, drinking with friends in the hostels and in the shebeens, where alcohol really flows, hips gyrate, the shebeen queens rule.

I remember visiting a bar in Monze, Zambia… It was one of those night-stops for the truckers, hauling goods across the continent.

Music loud and pounding. Young women. Men relaxing, needing to, wanting to… Music, electric rhythm, pounding…. HIV spreading.

Alexandra Clinic, non-governmental service, set up by anti-apartheid medical students in the late 1940s. The service operated in a sea of people and fragmented lives. Medical students from Wits came to train and hone their skills and maybe offer something back to the community on whose backs they became more skilled and marketable. Often left alone, the only service providers; alongside nurses more skilled but more constrained in what they were authorised to deliver.

It was a night like many others, the usual blood and alcohol, people slightly boisterous, or slightly depressed, up or down depending on how long ago was the last drink and in what circumstances.

An ambulance pulled up. Man taken out, lots, and lots, of blood. He was wheeled in, bloody and gurgling, on a trolley, half lying, half sitting, gurgling, gurgling, gggrrhhh, ggrrrhh, rrgghh as he tried to draw breath.

Blood everywhere, streams of it on the floor. That bright bright red …

Slashed trachea, across the windpipe, gaping hole, gasping, horrible sound, gurgling, blood, gggrrhh, ggrrrhh, rrrgghh.

Flesh ripped by … a knife, a machete? Brought down with force right into that great tube on which we all depend… intending to end a life.

My case, my responsibility. Nobody else around.

Me and some of the nurses, and the ambulance-men.

But they’d already done their duty.

Collected him.

Strapped him in.

Oxygen. Brightening that blood. Bright bright red.

Brought him in….

Now my turn.

I tried to sit him up to look at the wound, although it was so clear even from a distance. Gaping hole in the middle of his neck.

Blood squirting, bright red… blood spurted, an artery slashed, blood shot up, frothed out, gurgling, spurting, frothing.

Adrenalin flowing – mine – not sure what to do; cortisol flowing – his – on the edge of life, knowing he was about to go.

Terror, clammy, on the edge.

Have you ever experienced that? Terrifying, knowing this is it. THIS … IS … IT. Silence.

He was fighting to survive. Restless, clammy, shocked, cold, on the edge and slipping. Pale, sort of plasticine coloured brownish grey. Not black at all.

I moved him down to look closer, but blood spurted, frothed, glugged, ggrrrhhh rrrgggh again. Crimson bright red. Frothy, bubbles oozing away, more than any foam bath, gurgling and frothing, sometimes spurting, bright, bright red. Ultra-bright. Royal crimson bright. Beautiful colour, terrifying when it’s part of somebody, squirting, spurting, rhythmically, in front of you.

Intravenous line set up, difficult but done despite his clapped out veins, the pipe-like needle unsheathed into his arm. Adrenalin pouring, man dying, I called for an ambulance to get him to hospital.

He was clapped out, shocked, clammy, wettish, cool almost cold feeling of skin without blood flowing just beneath the skin.

One thought in my mind – get him into an ambulance, get him on his way… I didn’t know what to do, blood spurting, squirting, spurting, frothing... Bright red, really bright, really red, crimson, foaming. So bright. I knew he had to go.

“Where’s that fucken ambulance, get him out of here!”

He’s going to die.

I don’t know what to do.

I’m alone.

Ambulance siren, ambulance-men, he’s on the stretcher again, lying down, blood spurting, frothing, red, everywhere,

gurgling, gggrrhhh, gggrrhhh,

lie him back… no… more blood, more froth, more distress.

“Get him out of here!”

The ambulancemen wheel him out and put him in the ambulance, oxygen mask once again over frothing blood, turning deep red to even brighter red froth.

Off to Tembisa, the hospital everybody hated, the hospital they associated with death. Strange how a hospital can be seen like that, the place where people die… people who get sent there don’t come out again…

That hospital must have been really really bad, or maybe, it was just that people were in a really, really bad way, when they got there...

Wheeled away. Siren now screaming into the night … on to that hospital of death.

Dark, depressed, next patient for suturing, more blood, more alcohol, more spatters on clothes, stale smell on breath, smell of drying blood.

Dark plasticky brown splashes on the floor.

Out of depth. Meaning to do good, but … out of depth… another cold and clammy body claimed. Another family torn apart, holed, gapped, broken, fragmented…

In the night… material for nightmares. That froth, that colour, that squirting, spurting… right there, that hole… in his neck.

My job.