It was difficult for Fillemon to locate any remaining discarded bottles along his section of the shore once the sun was up. Long experience had shown that the harvest from the township’s outdoor drinking sessions at month-end would barely reward his effort if he waited until he could see flashes of glass glinting at first light.
Two men who quartered the same area had contrived to rig up powerful head torches; they thus always managed to collect most of the bounty before Fillemon’s arrival, even if he did pitch before a crimson glow had started to smear the horizon behind the dunes inland. Yet with nothing else to occupy his time, and few other opportunities for earning cash currently, he’d been compelled to take up beachcombing before daybreak on his retrenchment from the fish-packing factory.
It was unpleasant work. Feral dogs harassed him as he used the torch on his cousin’s Samsung to try to spot the tell-tale winks from bottles half-buried in the sand. In the three years that he’d been engaged in this monthly task, Fillemon had stumbled over several other objects that – on closer inspection – had forced him to turn away and regurgitate his meagre breakfast of dry bread and cold tea onto the beach beside him. What’s more, regardless of the weekend’s takings, Erastus would demand an exorbitant fee from him for the loan of the phone and the cost of charging it.
At least during the winter months, the other gleaners tended to rise later, reluctant to leave their swaddle of blankets to brave the cruel easterlies – especially those individuals whose territory was the verges of the highway linking Walvis Bay and Swakopmund, where occasionally one of them might be hit by a car sideswiped off course by a sandstorm’s particularly violent blast.
Fillemon had set out at 6:30, not expecting to have much company on this particular Saturday morning. He ought to have rejoiced at the lack of competition from his two fellow foragers but the reason for their absence was so disturbing that he had been unable to sleep as he dwelt on it through the bitter July night. The most recent shack fire – which had raged through a neighbouring informal settlement two evenings ago, destroying a large cluster of miserable dwellings – had killed the infant daughter of one of the other scavengers, a friendly character named Sebulon already brought low, like so many others, by the downturn in fishing activities at the port during the pandemic.
Fillemon supposed that the other man who patrolled the same patch of shoreline as him would be out already among the still-smoking ruins of the half-dozen shebeens, gathering bottles that had been left undamaged despite the infernal heat of the conflagration, which had spread from shack to shack with almost unbelievable speed. The crime-scene tape around the areas of charred wooden beams and blackened corrugated metal panels had only been removed by the police combing the site towards dusk on Friday, finally allowing the former occupants to return to what was left of their homes and businesses – mournful little groups of downcast men and women, bundled up in donated blankets, kicking at the ashes to try and uncover anything salvageable they could take away with them, raising clouds of dirty cinders as they went about their grim work.
However Fillemon hadn’t the stomach to join Shilongo, even though he knew that a few hours spent excavating through the wreckage of the illegal drinking dens would doubtless yield a valuable hoard; not only a great many empty bottles he could exchange for their deposit but probably some, still intact, that contained liquor he might sell.
Although shack fires were a distressingly common occurrence in the informal settlements surrounding Fillemon’s own block, the most recent blaze had come closer than any previous one to threatening his half-finished breeze-block-and-wooden-pallet room. He and his neighbours had formed a human chain in the choking twilight, passing up containers of foetid water from the wide ditch that looped around their section of the slum, managing to extinguish the many small flareups lit by embers flying across from the main fire. They continued to douse the piles of rubbish that might kindle at any second until the wind finally subsided. Then, panting and sweating despite the chill, the group turned to contemplate the calamity that was engulfing the community next door.
The panorama laid out under the bloodred mantle of leaping flames told a common-enough story. A welding spark from one of the chop shops 500 metres away across the stagnant gully had likely ignited a waist-high tussock of desiccated grass in the alley between the shacks, a passageway doubtless filled with trash, cardboard boxes and windblown paper. The dull explosions Fillemon heard as he’d sat down to his supper of pap, oblivious until then of the drama unfolding nearby, had come from a cuca shop that sold gas bottles from out of a padlocked wire cage to the rear.
These two premises – the epicentre of the inferno – had soon been reduced to smouldering debris while adjacent buildings combusted in seconds, sending towering columns of golden sparks and black smoke upwards in a widening circle. Loud clatters of falling timbers and some strange whooshing noises accompanied the scene as gusts of hot air had driven towards Fillemon and the other bystanders. Only once the wind had died down they could hear the shrill screams and hoarse bellows of terror coming from the running figures illuminated across the way. The arrival of a single fire truck an hour after the alarm had first been raised was met with a round of sarcastic applause from the spectators.
All of this Fillemon remembered again, padlocking the steel door of his home in the darkness. Twelve people had perished but already a rumour was circulating that it was going to be impossible to identify and arrest anybody responsible.
So why, then, could he now see a long line of blue and red lights flashing along the slip-road to his left as he began heading down to his regular beat on the shore? Police cars, maybe ten of them, parked silently between open-bed trucks, the latter containing groups of seated men crowded together (although Fillemon struggled to see much in the lights’ blinding glare).
He changed direction and was heading towards the off-ramp when the noise from all the engines stopped suddenly, as if on command. In the moments it took him to ascend the beach, the sky behind the procession lightened to livid pink and he observed that the workmen, all masked and wearing orange coveralls, were carrying an assortment of pick axes, shovels and pangas.
As a bulldozer rumbled past them down the slope, the lorries disgorged their occupants. Fillemon was now close enough to see the men standing about in quiet groups, shifting tools from hand to hand, their posture somehow sheepish. Each was looking in the direction of the razed homes and shattered little enterprises – all that was left of one portion of the pitiful sprawl of improvised buildings that they’d been scheduled to demolish this very morning. Fillemon’s own block was earmarked for levelling at some point soon too; the residents had recently heard an official announcement to that effect on the radio.
Could it be that whoever was responsible for the order to dismantle the shacks today hadn’t heard about the recent fire? That was surely impossible, so Fillemon had to assume that an urgent overnight assessment had been made and – incredibly – the powers-that-be had decided that the planned destruction should proceed regardless.
Perhaps it even seemed logical to do it now, with half the families currently homeless anyway. Get the place cleared out before the wretched survivors have a chance to return, loaded up with donations of furniture, clothes and construction materials from generous people in the town.
Because it is a generous town thought Fillemon, wondering why he could now see several orange-clad figures hauling themselves back up into the trucks. Yes, a small place where people know each other and one person’s troubles are felt by countless relations, friends, acquaintances and compassionate strangers. Including those lucky enough to have lowly manual jobs with the municipality but who also possess scruples that prevent them from participating in the obliteration of a thriving community of people very like themselves. Folk doing their best with the very little they have, against all the unjust challenges that life throws their way.
The clank of metal tools being hurled back into the lorries accompanied Fillemon as he retraced his steps to begin scouring the blustery beach. Somebody in one of the trucks waved at him, but he couldn’t make out who it was through the still-fuggy haze.
Today wouldn’t be the day that the neighbouring kambashus would be cleared out after all. And August might not be the month when his own settlement disappeared, either. But the day was coming he knew, just as night must always follow dawn.
Read – The Murder – A Short Story by Ikhenoba Marcel Joseph, Nigeria
