From my letterbox I retrieve an envelope with bright South African stamps and my mother's handwriting. I rip it open and stand on the pavement reading a cutting from the East London Daily Dispatch, newspaper of the town in South Africa where I was born.
The article is called 'My Kinda Town' — in which street sweepers, traffic cops and domestic workers spill their dreams and desires to a journalist bent on humanising the foot soldiers of mundane life. The face of the man in the photograph, a car guard on the East London beachfront, stares out at me.
As I read, my mind flees Hyacinth Street, Sydney, and lands as a ten-year-old in the courtyard of my South African home. There, under the wash lines eight-year-old Anthony Fortuin, named in honour of my father, was clinging to me. From the scullery window where she was washing dishes, his mother, our cook, Katrina, screamed, 'Let her go, what you thinking? Lord, this child of mine is naughty.'
'Mum, where are you, Mum?' My daughter calls from inside the house. 'It's lunchtime.' Irritated at finding me in a reverie on the street, she takes the proffered cutting and stares at the photograph. 'Who is this man?'
According to the article, 54-year-old Anthony Fortuin cleans gutters and guards cars around the aquarium in East London. He says some people give him money. When he gets 50 Rand he buys himself a piece of pre-cooked chicken, otherwise he eats brown bread.
Where is your mother? my memory screams for him. Your mother, who roasted fat chickens and legs of lamb in our oven, your mother who cooked giant pots of meaty bones for our dogs, her brown arms pitted with burns from our kettles when alcohol impaired her vision and rattled her hands?
'All I want,' says Anthony, 'is a workman's vest so that people know why I'm here.'
*****
A few years ago in the Valhalla cinema in Sydney I watched a film of the music of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The heroism of the 1976 school children humbled me and inspired hope for the generations to follow. I wept from beginning to end.
In the seat next to me, a man with brown arms and a brown face