Plastic chairs

A few years ago, I was standing in a school quad looking at a furniture graveyard. The skeletal remains of desks and chairs were piled in what must have started as a stack but had grown into a jagged mound of educational debris. I can't remember the school, I can't remember why I was there, but the image of all the bended broken bits; I remember. I can also remember thinking that the discarded plastic chairs where so symbolic of the people and the system that broke them. Their graffitied orange seats would once have been clean and eager, they would have sat upright, prepared and full of potential. But now, at the end of the concrete quad, they're piled up anonymously with the inscriptions of the relatively powerful defining them far more so than their purpose.

I found myself sitting in a concrete quad last week, looking into the backs of some red plastic chairs. They were covered in black marker and shallow scratches, and were easing away from their metal structure at places, but they were still standing. I used to be bemused by the 'JFK' tag that is so ubiquitous in this part of Cape Town; why the fascination with Kennedy? Then I learnt about the Junky Funky Kids and my misguided assumptions were squashed by the contextual realities of Lavender Hill. So I'm sitting staring at JFK, at lists of names and one-liners, and I'm staring at the rows and rows of high school learners on the otherside of these chairs, sitting on the concrete with their hands up around their faces to shield them from the sun.

"It's not right that you come to write your exams the morning after your father gets shot," the principal is saying, "but that's our lives here and we need to work with it."
The learners nod, they understand. "So we try to make things work and we've got our turnaround strategy..." he continues.
It's hot. I put down my pen and phase out of focus. The women next to me are in visceral agreement with the principal, nodding, shaking, moving forwards and backwards in their seats. A little boy escapes his mother's hand as she raises them to clap at a statement she found particularly profound and he runs like toddlers do, aimlessly. I lose sight of him as he circles behind me but then here he is standing, staring up at me open-mouthed. I smile, "Hey kid." No response. No fear, no shyness, no engagement, just silence, absence. So I sit there staring at him as he stands staring at me.

"...and so we painted a wall of commitment and you have all committed to coming to school this year?"
The learners chorus "Yis," as though his doubt is unfounded. He nods, puts away his notes and sits down. As the woman in front of me joins in the vigorous applause, her chair wobbles preemptively. She stops clapping and holds on the metal legs to steady it. It steadies. Three of the four feet back on the ground, the last one hovering permanently above it. I'm transfixed as I watch that chair, it reminds me of something. Falling-not falling-falling-not falling-falling-not falling: yes, like DiCaprio's spinning top.

There is no shade in this quad, only sun and sweat and the soundless prayers of the mothers around me, echoing off the painted walls and into the seated swarm of chance.