The first three doors were only white outlines, skeletal and unhelpful. But the fourth door was open. She could see her own name written at its foot. And she could see inside the crack.
She tried to peer round the door painted on the concrete. She wanted very much to go inside, because there would be the old table of her own childhood, the lantern with its hot light, and in her room would be her small dressing gown in her childshape, and it would still fit her. Her mother would beckon to her; her father would come in to say goodnight. Everyone she had ever loved would be behind that door.
Except one. Her boy would be left out.
The woman shook herself against the seat, the shiver gathering at the back of her neck and travelling under each breast to the heart. Her mother was dead and gone and her father the same before that, and that was as it should be, each according to their time. She heard a snicking sound and understood that the door had closed.
The boy’s mother looked back up at the bus driver and saw, oh sweet Jesus, a crowd of women passengers closed in around him, shaking him by the shoulders and shouting at him as if he’d been asleep.
The bus had finally slowed. The grinding along the sides of her car began to ease. The woman tried to lie back in her seat but it was bent out of shape and she was thrown oddly to the side, like a crash-test dummy.
They both came to a halt in the middle of the highway. Cars swirled around the diversion in the morning current towards the city.
The bus’s doors sighed open and the women pushed each other aside in their eagerness to hurry down the steps and onto the tarmac. They poured over her like ants, touching her with their feelers to make sure that she was alive.
‘Not a scratch!’ they marvelled, over and over, shaking their heads, patting her down. ‘Yhu! Not a scratch!’
The bus driver was still in the bus, afraid to come down, insisting that he hadn’t seen her, hadn’t seen her at all. He was shaking, the alcohol seeping out through the pores in his frightened skin.
The police and the rescue workers eventually had to cut her out of her car. The
BMW
had been squeezed like a tube of toothpaste between the bus and the concrete; it left scrapes of green paint among the ivy.
The women waited and watched, exclaiming among themselves. The stars on their chests shone in the daylight, shone like they belonged there in rigid constellations. One woman moved back, shifting her bulk from foot to foot. She adjusted her beret and began to sing a chorus.
The others straightened up and responded: she sang the lines and the rows of ranked women bellowed them back at her.
The two officers on traffic duty walked over to the elongated car, shaking their heads. The woman strapped onto the paramedics’ gurney watched their blue silhouettes approach. She overheard the one cursing when he tripped over something metallic. It clattered against his boot and came to rest against the wall. She turned her head to see it more closely, and the paramedic grabbed her face between his gloved hands and moved it firmly back into place. But before he did, she saw what was lying there: two tins that had held spraypaint.
MIDNIGHT BLACK
read the label on one tin, and on the other
RADIANT WHITE
.
M
ONICA GRIPPED THE COLD PORCELAIN
. She stared at herself in the mirror and thought, I want to go home. She had come to the bathroom for sanctuary, but things were no better. The toilets had backed up and the floor ran with piss; there was no toilet paper, no soap; people were queuing to get into the stalls: inside and outside were the same. The squat woman whose job it was to clean the place leaned against the door frame, thumbing double-jointed texts on her phone. She looked up every once in a while, scanning for predators and bosses. Monica saw how tightly her hair was braided, how it pulled her features to the sides of her skull. Unaffected by the chaos, she shifted her weight to the other foot every few minutes and reached up idly to scratch her scalp with a pointed fingernail.
People kept pushing through the swing door into the bathroom. They were all in groups, in pairs. They jostled happily against Monica, jamming her hipbones sharply against the sink.
‘Soz!’ called one man with a gleaming, shaven head. He was dressed as Ken, his naked pectorals outlined in body paint. He bobbed like a boxer past Monica: his cheerfulness narrowed her eyes. She kept watching him in the mirror. His partner was Barbie, in a cascading blonde wig and pink sequins that were reflected by the white tiles. Monica wanted to warm her hands on him. Barbie didn’t acknowledge her. He was hobbling on his stilettos, trailing Ken. Barbie was four hours past gratitude: he stumbled and sniffed, wailing for Ken to
wait
, that his feet
hurt
, that he always went too
fast
. They made a chain only because Barbie had one hand clenched on his partner’s belt – the only point of purchase. They fell into the final cubicle. His complaint was cut off abruptly.
At least they were polite. Sometimes people shut the doors of the stalls but mostly they didn’t care who saw them. And why should they? The Mother City Queer Project was the one bright night in the whole year that the lunatics ran the asylum: costumed, ostentatious, anonymous.
Monica twisted round to look at her bunny tail in the mirror. The white fluff drooped, sodden. It had seemed so perky at five in the afternoon when they were at Karen’s flat, downing Savannas and dressing up as characters from
Alice in Wonderland
, giggling and shrieking, ‘Drink me!’ ‘Eat me!’ before collapsing on the carpet. They were supposed to stick together, but Monica had no idea where the Red Queen was. She shouldn’t have been hard to find: her dress was made of playing cards strung together with paperclips. Alice herself, in blue eyes, painted freckles and a transparent dress, had disappeared almost immediately, gone through the looking glass with some grinning, groping man.
Monica’s costume had not been appreciated by the few mean boys at
MCQP
. She had spent an hour dodging frantically through the warren of the Good Hope Centre, zigging and zagging from room to beating room as two bullies with water pistols took turns to aim at her fluffy tail. She had realised too late that it was glowing, irresistible, florescent in the dark, and there was nowhere quiet to rest except the toilets.
I’m late
, thought Monica the Rabbit.
I’m late, I’m late, I’m late – for a very important date.
She dabbed at her sagging eyeliner and sallow cheeks. I’m so tired I look dead, she thought. I’m too old for
MCQP
. It’s three in the morning and I just want to skip this whole thing and go straight to the waffles at the
BP
at sunrise.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. This night was supposed to be the end of good behaviour, when you could discard everything you knew and lose yourself in the craziness with your friends, maybe find someone serendipitous who felt the way you did about everything. And you’d be together, high as kites, the ribbons on your tails fluttering gaily down to Earth so little children who had to sit down to bored breakfasts would look up at the sky and go, Ah, I want to be just like that.
Monica squinted at the towelette dispenser. It was already almost empty, and there were still six hours of
MCQP
to go. She could read the ad on it reversed in the mirror.
Andrex!
chirped the plundered dispenser.
Put a smile on your cheeks!
From behind the door of the cubicle came giggling, and the swishing of Barbie’s costume being pulled down over his thighs. ‘My tights!’ he complained. The cleaner paused mid-text and stared stolidly back at Monica. I should leave, she thought. I’ll just go home. The others won’t even know. I’ll just say I lost them or that I was sick. It’s the truth.
But she concentrated on the dispenser, transfixed, and listened to the two men having sex. The cleaner listened with her, head cocked, lips pursed.
With Andrex lightly moistened toilet tissue, feel cleaner, fresher and up for anything!
Monica read the advert over and over. Then she marvelled at how her mascara had run: her whiskers were smeared around her mouth in a five o’clock shadow. She checked her own phone but there were no panicked messages from the denizens of Wonderland. Maybe it was hard to get a signal underground.
It was the same feeling she had had in Standard Five at Nathan Sandler’s party, when she had hurled herself around the lounge to ‘What a Feeling.’ Her denim skirt had split with an almighty rip. Everybody had seen her panties. Monica felt the embarrassment low in her chest like heartburn. It had been fifteen years since then, and it still seared without cauterising. She washed her hands slowly, and carefully turned off the taps with her elbows. The last cubicle was silent now except for some sniffling. Monica wanted to put her ear to it but she backed away from the sink and made for the door.
‘Sorry, sisi,’ she said to the cleaner. The woman moved languidly out of the way. That’s the most I’ve spoken to anyone tonight, thought Monica. She squeezed past the woman, who gave off a startled scent of Sunlight soap, like a succulent trodden underfoot. Monica made off across the slippery dancefloor, kicking wet condoms with knots in them, skipping paper cups that bore the marks of teeth.
The place was emptying. I’ll just have one more quick look for everyone and then I’m out of here, she told herself. She wandered through the rooms, blinded by strobes; the smoke unmitigated by bodies made her cough. The caverns stretched and multiplied before her. I’ll never get out of here, she thought. It’s the underworld. And my feet hurt. She wished she had someone whose belt she could grip while they strode ahead, pathfinder, outlier, sure of the way.
At the next quietish, darkish room she came to, Monica stopped. There were unoccupied beanbags in a corner, and from there she had a fair view of anyone on their way out of the main entrance. I’ll just wait here for a bit, she thought. Work out how to get home without a car. The thought of emerging from the damp cavern of the Centre into the brisk, real world of the parking lot – where her breath would puff out of her in clouds and her wet bum would freeze even though it was December – made her want to cry. The trains at Cape Town Station weren’t running yet, and she had no money for taxis. Monica rested her head on her arms.
‘Hello.’
The boy who had lolloped over to her was not in costume. Not unless he was James Dean after the accident, she thought, with his eyes rolling and his smashed head lolling to one side. The boy’s legs were bulky, as if he were wearing metal braces under his trousers. Callipers, thought Monica. That’s what they’re called. In Standard Five – the Year of the Upskirt Incident in front of Nathan Sandler and also Nathan Sandler’s mother and his three grown-up brothers – they had had a piano teacher whose legs were embraced the same way. The man creaked when he walked. The kids laughed a little, but they were terrified: he brought something with him to Kimberley Junior School that wasn’t there before.
The boy didn’t go away. He stood in front of her, at least a head shorter than she was. Why was it always the crooked men who come over? The jacks-in-the-boxes, the snakes under splintering ladders? She peered at the white scars seaming him, like a stitchety voodoo doll, up one whole side of his torso and down again on the other. The tissue shone florescent under the blacklight, disappearing into the white sleeve of his T-shirt and then ducking underneath, as if his arms had been pulled off and reattached in the opposite sockets. Everything about him was wrong. Monica couldn’t help it: she stared. She stared and he stood there, waiting until she was done.
He spoke again, without invitation. Men thought they could just do that. As he talked, she heard the terrible lisping drag of his tongue. He breathed in the wrong places, like someone who has heard about the process but never had to do it themselves.
‘I come … every year,’ said the stitched boy.
‘Ah,’ said Monica. She thought, Leave me alone, you freak. I’m lonely but I’m not
desperate
.
He read her answer as encouragement and began to lower himself to the beanbag beside her. The awkward weight of his body depressed the contents and she felt herself sliding sideways, her bare thighs sticking a little as they detached themselves from the plastic cover. She had to put out her hands to stop herself falling onto the angles of his lap.
‘Last … year … I missed it.’
Monica scrabbled for purchase and righted herself.
‘Really.’
‘I was … in hospital. I broke … every bone in my body. I was in … an accident.’ He leaned in further, confiding. His mouth twisted. ‘I broke my … funny bone.’
Oh God, thought Monica. He’s making a joke.
He had to learn everything over.
Everything. Like what was funny. She couldn’t reply, so she looked at him instead. His perseverance appalled her.
‘I thought … next year … I’ll be there. I don’t care. I’m … still
alive
.’
She was morbidly interested. She didn’t want to be, but she was.
‘Here?’ She waved at the last few dancers and the detritus on the floor. ‘For this?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘For this.’ He reached out and touched her unbroken kneecap with one finger. Monica stared at the digit on her leg. She was thinking about Barbie dolls, how their ratchety knees bent,
click-click-click
. How their knees could bend both ways, because Barbies don’t have kneecaps.
He was peering at her in the darkness. There were no scars on this side of his face – or maybe the kind light just erased them. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there. Oh Jesus, thought Monica, he’s going to ask me to dance with him. She waited for the question, and it came as she had thought it would. In the dark he sounded like any other boy. When it counted, he barely lisped at all.
‘Will you dance with me?’
Monica thought about it. She really did.
‘The music’s too soft,’ she said. The idea of having to hold him against her was exhausting; she felt as if she would never get up again.