The world smells of sea and coffee and clammy skin and fallen flowers. And, absurdly, of hope. However dirt poor you are, however long since Lady Luck smiled on you, something in this town tells you that your fortunes may change at the drop of a hat.
He goes from bar to bar, coffee shop to coffee shop, bookshop to bookshop, in a bid to find a job. Again and again he is spurned. He can tell some folk find it forward of him to seek a job handling books and paper, china and teaspoons as a skint black man. They frown at his duds. Smirk at his flip-flops. They are wary of the litany of highbrow words at his fingertips. And warier still of his crook hand.
At the Long Street Bar he begs for a glass of water. A surly barman taps water into the glass and tells him to drink it outside, out on the pavement. Eyes at the bar glare low and leery over cold beer. He goes out and casts his eyes to the mountain. From this angle it is a vast iron anvil and it bears down on him, squeezing air from his lungs. He draws in a draft of dry berg wind chased by a swig of lukewarm water. No ice for him. He wants to fling the glass down on the paving to see shards scatter and blink in the sun. Instead he skulks through the bar gloom again and bows as he hands the man the glass. The eyes of the beer swiggers sweep him out.
He unwinds the cloth from his shot hand to air the wound.
A posse of Nigerians in tweed caps hangs out outside a bottle store. Their hands are never still. They shuffle wads of money, they flip and catch coins, they twiddle Rizla paper between thumbs and trigger fingers, they thumb lighter wheels to spit fire, they text one-handedly, their thumbs game-boying over the keys. When they catch him staring, one of them tells him to
piss off
and spits at him.
Jabulani is gobsmacked by this spat venom.
The spitter draws a knife and runs the back of the blade along his throat.
Jabulani spins on his heels and hotfoots it down Long Street in the goofy, jerky tempo of a silent movie.
The Nigerians fling jeers after him that may not crack his bones yet sting like peach stones.
He weaves through the canvas-roofed stalls of Greenmarket Square, where they sell masks and drums and cloths and carved animals and other bazaar curios. They are from Gambia, Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania ... Timbuktu. White tourists who can’t tell one black from another are fooled into imagining it is all South African art. A bone peddler sells fly-specked bones piled on newspaper. A travelling barber plies his trade under a beach umbrella. A Chinese
faf
man sells luck from a box.
– Dream of the moon, you bet on 9. Dream of a dog, you bet on 27. Dream of pussy ... well then, you had your good time.
And it is then that he catches sight of a man whiter than any other. Ghost Cowboy standing in front of a stall that sells absurdly lanky giraffes carved out of wood in the Zimbabwean style.
Jabulani’s blood runs cold.
Ghost Cowboy screws his right thumb into the palm of his left hand to describe Jabulani’s stigmata hole to the stall keeper. Then he hands the man money and a scrap of paper. The man nods.
Jabulani slides his hands into his pockets and falls into a dead run along Shortmarket Street and then down Loop Street, where illegal aliens loll about, begging for jobs and smoking to kill time. He runs all the way down to the harbour, where seals slide into the sea as seagulls carp and tourists gawp and fishing boats bob shadowlessly under a zenith sun.
H
ERMANUS MARKET.
The scent of Hunter’s
rooibos
tea reminds me of my mother reading to me in Amsterdam (
Of Mice and Men
,
The Old Man and the Sea
) and how she never folded down the corners but marked how far she’d read with a guineafowl feather instead. And how I begged her to tell me of South Africa and she’d tell me that if you filtered it all down you ended up with a blue sea and flower sellers in Adderley Street and
snoek
fishermen in Hout Bay and Zulu rickshaw men in Durban ... and a hole dug by diamond hunters. All things spinning around a deep, deep plughole.
And always,
rooibos
tea and frangipani and the giddy smell of the sea.
And though the words and images eluded her, the murmuring cadences of my mother’s voice sent my sister drifting into tulip-vivid dreams.
I am joggled out of reverie by her heading this way, by the swishing whisper of flouncy fabric against her skin, and by the telltale outline of a tanga.
Buyu follows her like a dog. For a moment I fear he’ll sniff at her ass. I wonder how he senses this is her, my seagull girl.
– Hey. I heard you play your guitar the other day, in front of the Burgundy. And I was wondering ...
A fermata: an unbearably sustained note.
– ... if you’d play for me this Friday.
My heart goes haywire like a rat in a box.
Buyu nods frenziedly and hops from foot to foot behind her tangaed ass.
Words find it tricky to travel through my dry gullet:
– For ... you? Just for you ... alone?
She laughs that killing, pearly laugh again.
– I’m having a party. A few folk are coming out from Cape Town.
My heart flick-flacks. She’s inviting me to her party!
– I thought it’d be cool to have live music.
Fool. She’s not inviting me to hang out with her. She just wants me to amuse her friends. This casts me in another undefined limbo: I’ll be neither guest nor servant. In a word, the problem of being
coloured
in South Africa under apartheid.
– How much do you charge?
Buyu’s flicking his fingers to signal
mucho mucho
money.
– I play at Quayside for tips.
– He charges five hundred a throw. He’s good, Hunter pipes up.
– Five hundred?
I glare at Hunter.
– We can haggle ... if you want, I tell Lotte.
Zero’s Survival Tip #2.
Moffied down.
– He’d sell his mother for a pittance, Hunter flippantly footnotes.
Lotte squints her eyes. Amused? Bemused? Hard to tell.
– What kind of music do you play?
– All kinds, punts Buyu.
– I play folk rock. Indie, I’d say. I love The Black Keys. And I can do reggae.
– Can you play any Wilco?
– Just ‘Kamera’, from
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
.
– Hey. You’re tuned in.
– Tuned into what? Hunter quips in her wisecrack way.
– To find my place you just follow the path from the harbour towards Kwaaiwater. Come along after the market shuts down. You’ll see fairy lights hanging in the yard. And a flowering frangipani.
I act witless to hide the fact that I have voyeured into her frangipani yard from the cover of milkwoods.
– Cool.
– Hey, I don’t know your name.
– Jerusalem.
She arcs a brow.
–
Jerusalem?
– You may call me Jero, if you’d rather. My old man does.
– No. Jerusalem’s magic. There’s music in it.
I feel as if a blade fan is spinning in my head. Or a seabird flapping his wings.
Whhhoooff. Whhhoooff. Whhhoooff.
L
ONG STREET, CAPE TOWN
. Another day.
Jabulani breathes in a fusion of sea tang, coffee fumes and pigeon funk. He dodges the sassy boys who flick blades and barbs at him. He keeps his hands in his pockets and his eyes peeled for Ghost Cowboy.
He drifts among the skirted and spurned, the spat-on and burned, among the soot-handed and dust kissed: the flotsam of Africa forever waiting for Godot among pigeon feathers and fag stubs and dream shards, forever condemned to a gutter limbo. A hapless aura hangs off them like a tatty shadow.
Followed by their dazed eyes, he fears he’ll end up as just such a gutter zombie, for he lacks a cocky faith in his fate. If Thokozile had not spurred him on, he’d never have embarked on this jinxed journey.
On another frequency he overhears fragments of frivolous café dialogue about films and music, about
The Beach
and Coldplay, about Tarantino and Oasis. To them, the mojito sippers and sushi junkies, the cursed and huddled are invisible. They tune out the jabberings of the beggars and prophets. They are as cool and aloof in their cooled cafés and capsuled bars as the white window dummies flaunting fine dresses his wife has never had money for.
He sees a stray dog pissing against a bicycle festooned with bags full of flotsam and junk.
He idly stares at a stub-footed man in aviator goggles jabbing a fist at the raging sun.
Echoes of his Zimbabwe waylay him. A woman with hair cornrowed like Thokozile’s holding a newspaper as a parasol. A
penga
beggar crooning Bob Marley into the mouth of a beer bottle like a love-mad pigeon. A song by Zimbabwean singer Tuku on the radio. Warped figures sculpted from Zimbabwean stone lurking in a cool café courtyard. Jigsaw words in Ndebele painted on alley walls. The crazy laugh of a hoopoe, the bird they call
hleka mfazi
in his lingo. A young Zimbabwean called Zola catching a shaft of sun after a weekend in jail for loitering. Somehow between van and jail he had lost a shoe.
Jabulani and Zola and maybe a million other Zimbabwean interlopers all hustling for a foot in the door, for a handful of sand to put a shack on, for the freedom not to have to glance over your shoulder all the time.
At noon a cannon sounds on Signal Hill and folk down tools. Bricklayers and street sweepers lie flat on the pavement of Loop Street to doze.
Jabulani fishes a newspaper out of the bin to rest his head on. Then he too lies down flat on Loop and gazes up at the mountain. Up on slopes, beyond Jabulani’s range of sight, stoned
bergies
hide from the burning sun under foraged skins of tarp. Jabulani’s eyelids fall. Red sunlight flares through his thin lid-skin, so he turns his head to the side. He’s about to glide into dream when a furry tail tickles his face. He smiles when he sees it’s just a squirrel, not a feral dog or some furry demon. And it is then that the article in the paper under his head catches his eye.
Just a few lines about a shooting at a Shell garage upcountry. That two men were fatally shot. And that an as-yet-unidentified woman survived. The men had been shot in the head. Her Pajero had gone up in flames, making it hard for police to identify her. Police have yet to discover the reason for the shooting as the till had not been robbed.
Jabulani is over the moon that he does not, however obliquely, have her blood on his hands.
And yet, another afternoon of being snubbed and scorned taps his euphoria dry. Now he’s told
so sorry
with a pitying smile, now he’s told to
voetsek!
A smug hissing through snarled lips:
Voetsek!
The thing you shout at gadfly dogs.
He walks though the cobbled Malay Quarter of houses painted in lurid colours on crazily slanting streets. The happy houses laugh at a world otherwise so dull and flat. Chirping women in vivid head cloths remind him of macaws. All white-framed doors and windows shut and shuttered to him. Through the door of a mosque he sees men dipping white beards to the floor. They are all aligned, like sheep in the wind.
At dusk Jabulani walks downhill to sit like a starved, jaded Buddha on the harbour wall.
Robben Island glows in the dusking orange. And a fevered sea flings up kelp offerings. Yet he feels shot down. All hollowed out.
H
ERMANUS. AFTER DUSK.
A half-moon hangs in the frangipani in front of Lotte’s house. Fairy lights do indeed dance in the sea wind. Lotte’s sitting in a lotus mode on a Bali sofa, her feet folded up under her. Johnny Clegg is singing that song on the hi-fi about a crocodile in the river and sharks in the sea:
It’s a cruel crazy beautiful world
...
Al and a few other guys stand around the fire in Bermudas. There’s something tribal about it. Al’s unwittingly tapping out the beat of the song with his tongs on an empty beer bottle.
The guys are immersed in deep dialogue: Do you stack firewood in a wigwam V or Jenga style? Do you spice a T-bone beforehand or just salt it on the fire? Do you uncoil the
boerewors
or not? If not, do you spike it with a kebab stick to keep it coiled? Do you cook fish in tinfoil or char the skin?
– Folk who cook on gas are
moffies
, tunes one dude forever
whirring
the wheel of his Zippo.
The gas fares far, like a lizard’s yellow tongue.
Haha-ing
and clinking of beer bottles confirm this universal axiom. Gas =
moffie
.
– I heard in America they cook hamburgers on the
braai
, says another.
The guys shake their heads and hiss
jissus
at the craziness of America.
Lotte unwinds from her lotus mode to tip wine from a bottle into the glasses of other lolling, murmuring girls.
Guys around the fire. Girls further away. It has always been this way.
I hover on the fringe of the guys, wishing I had the guts to just drift over to the sipping, fanning girls. Her being so near puts all my senses on edge. Through the muddling of male voices I hear the shuffling of frangipani leaves in the wind, the yips of distant dogs, the lilting cadences of her limpid voice. I imagine I can filter out all the macho guys to hear whales sing their mellow sorrows. And that I can see the world curving towards the horizon.
– One cool thing about this new South Africa is you no longer have to fear the ANC blowing you to hell and gone, remarks Al.
– And you no longer have to check out on TV them chucking a tyre over a man’s head and lighting him up, Zippo Dude tunes.
He apes the shuddering dance of a man burnt in the townships as an informer.
– That’s uncool, scolds Al. Find another gig if you want to act like an asshole.
– Hey, chill, man, Zippo Dude whines.
Then, to deflect the focus, he sounds me out:
– How do you feel about firelighters?
– Me? I haven’t given it much thought.
He nods as if this underscores his instinctive view of me as somehow dodgy. Latently gay or Communist.
– The art of it is to get the fire to catch just using slivers of wood and newspaper, Al teaches.