/ 6 January 2005

Man falls 14 floors – and dies

Not the Mail & Guardian is Robert Kirby’s startling and savagely satirical parody of the Mail & Guardian newspaper. Any similarity between real people and characters portrayed here is anything but coincidental

Capetonians expressed dismay and disappointment this week after a man they watched fall from a 14-floor window struck the pavement — and died.

Alfred Swan (68) had reportedly been trying to water the flower boxes outside his office in Robey Leibrandt Memorial Tower in lower Heinkel Road on the foreshore, when he slipped and fell.

‘He fell beautifully,” said Adrie Geldeblom. ‘All fluttering clothes and big wide mouth, and then he hit and bounced. But then he just lay there. We waited, but he just lay there. It turned the day a little sour, you know?”

Retired hake-wrangler Felix January said he had never seen anything like it. ‘You’d read about guys falling at the docks all the time. Off the cranes, off the ships, off the wagon. But the newspaper said they always hit something on the way down like a cable or a gangway, or that they landed in a crate of snoek, or on a fat seal. This is confusing. It wasn’t even funny. I mean we laughed a bit, but you can’t keep laughing at someone who’s dead, can you?”

‘When he bounced we were sure he would survive,” said Kenneth Ntuli (28). ‘It was pretty standard, the bounce. I thought he’d hit a freak soft patch, maybe some softish tar melted by the sun, and that he’d land on his feet with only a fractured shinbone.”

Many blamed the anticlimactic nature of the incident on the media. ‘I think it’s disgraceful that we’ve had the facts hidden from us for so long,” said one observer who wished to remain anonymous for fear of being misquoted by the Cape Argus.

‘Now we have to ask ourselves: what else aren’t they telling us? Is it in fact dangerous to feed circus tigers steak out of your mouth? Should we stop paragliding near powerlines? It’s an outrage.”

Meanwhile, councillor Nero Capone, speaking from a bosberaad at Grand West Casino, said it served as a grim reminder to property owners to make sure their buildings were adequately equipped to prevent accidents.

‘Swan would almost certainly have survived had he fallen through three or four awnings, before sliding down on to a wagon full of fruit. We will leave no stone unturned as we try to get to the bottom of this banal death.” —