Do you give to beggars?

To give or not to give. That is the question that many of us are confronted with every single day, though we usually avoid it by pretending that the man standing at the robots — nine times out of ten it’s a man — staring at you with a bin bag in his hands and a mournful look on his face doesn’t exist and is, in fact, a figment of somebody else’s imagination.

It’s a question I was forced to confront this evening and I’m still grappling with whether I’m pathetically easy or reluctantly virtuous. I honestly don’t know.

There I was minding my own business outside the Edgars in the Eastgate Mall, waiting to meet a friend for supper, when a man appeared beside me and said, “Excuse me m’am”. The overwhelming first impression he gave was of different, subtly graduated shades of brown, from sienna to taupe. He was filthy and almost toothless, and tanned in the way of white people who spend too much time in the sun, holding up pieces of cardboard. He looked like something out a Roger Ballen portrait and how he’d escaped being turfed out by the shopping mall security staff was something of a mystery. He certainly didn’t look as though he was there to stock up on hair gel at Clicks.

I knew what this was about. You always know, when somebody says excuse me, that they’re going to give you a sob story and attempt to sting you for cash. Normally I would have said no, sorry and hurried on my way, but he’d cornered me and there was no escaping the dismal inevitability of the transaction. You can’t ignore every single beggar out there; sooner or later critical mass builds up and you crumble. So I listened to his story, because that is part of the deal: it’s the ritual, the agreed way of things.

He’d been let out of Modderbee Prison that day, he said. He’d done his time, served five years (what for, he did not say). He needed to catch a train and he was short R42. R42: that was all he needed. He showed me the figure scrawled on a piece of paper soft with handling. It had once been white, presumably; now it was a gentle shade of dove grey. “I need something to eat,” he added, a melancholic tinge to his words. “I haven’t eaten anything all day, and people have been insulting me m’am, it’s terrible.”

Standard issue emotional blackmail.

“I don’t know if I have cash,” I said, which was the truth. As far as I could recall, I’d spent my last R20 on two Diet Cokes and a packet of jelly babies from the vending machine at work. I probed my handbag, examining the compartment in my wallet where I kept the notes, between the small change and my ID book. Lo and behold, I located a note, tightly folded. I prised it out, glanced at the number printed on it. My heart sank: R100.

Bugger.

There was a brief tussle with my conscience. How could I possibly give this man a R100 note? Why should this individual of all the sad cases I see every day be the recipient of such unintended generosity? What made him so special? Demographically he was all wrong, and I resented being picked out like this, the easy target, the obvious victim.

But … but. How could I say I had no money when I knew I did? I couldn’t exactly ask for change. And he was obviously on the bones of his bum; nobody can fake that degree of dental decrepitude. So I made the decision. It would pain me to give him that note, but he needed it more than I did. I couldn’t not give it to him, if that makes any sense; the situation simply didn’t allow for another outcome.

“You’ll get a hundred bucks out of me,” I said and grudgingly handed it over. “Thank you m’am,” he said, kissing its lovely crinkly crispness. “Thank you.” And then he was gone, marching so fast he could have passed for an Olympic race walker, while I stood there and thought to myself: you are so pathetic. Train ticket my arse.

But I knew that all along.

Then I did what all normal people do in this kind of situation, and updated my Facebook status. He got to tell his sob story, and now I was going to tell mine because that is the deal, the way we do things now.

I wonder what he’s done with the money.