–
Ja
. Firelighters is for pussies, says another.
Yet another tidy axiom.
– Hey. Fetch us another round of beer, Zippo Dude tunes me.
This is an apartheid tableau. White man commandeering a loitering coloured
boy
to do an odd job for him.
– You’ll find beer in the bathtub, says Al. Ta for the favour, hey.
I weave through the girls on the veranda. Lotte’s caught up in dialogue with a girl.
– They found out it’s not aliens, you see. It’s kangaroos high on poppy. Their hopping forms those circles in the rye.
I wish to hover there, hanging on her words, staring at the ghost lips on the rim of her wine glass, but another girl frowns at me for eavesdropping.
I kick off my All Stars and go barefoot over cool marble floors through a lounge of white sofas and rippling white curtains. Riotous oil paintings hang unframed and raw on the stark white walls. Hers? I sense so.
The bathtub is full of ice cubes and floating, chilling bottles of beer and cider. I fish out a few Windhoeks and a Savanna Light for me.
As I go by the girls again, Lotte sees me.
– Oh, there you are.
Her hand beckons me over like a good-luck cat in a Chinese shop. My heart tap-dances.
– Girls, this is Jerusalem, the guitar guy I told you about.
Muted, in-cahoots smiles. I sense she didn’t merely allude to my guitar.
– Come, Lotte cajoles, play for us.
– Oh yes, do, the girls chorus.
– I was sent to fetch beer.
– Oh, let them get their own beer.
I put down the beers and unzip my guitar.
I drop a pick and Lotte picks it up off the tiles. It’s always tricky peeling a pick up off a flat floor. I don’t let the nails on my picking hand get long, like some guitarists or some old Chinese men who see a spiralling fingernail as a measure of their unfazed aura. I catch a peek of her breasts as she bends down. My cheeks fizz and I focus on tuning the strings.
She smiles a slow, sly smile as she hands me the pick. As if she felt my eyes on her hidden skin. Then she glides over to the hi-fi and kills the music.
Al, perhaps pissed off that a girl’s fiddling with his hi-fi, shakes the dregs of his beer over the sizzling
boerewors
.
I tentatively finger a few strings and key down E.
– What do you want me to play?
– Play something lyrical.
– Lyrical?
I begin to play
Moonshadow
.
The girls swing feet and hum-sing along.
Zippo Dude huffs over to pick up the beers. He smirks at me when he sees I am a Savanna boy. Evidently Savanna Light’s pussy juice.
He clanks the beer bottles to
sabo
the song. Lotte glares at him.
After the song Zippo Dude chucks a coin at my feet.
– Hey Cat, play us another.
He laughs at his joke until Al jabs his hot tongs at him.
– You flipping
craaazy
? yelps Zippo Dude. You want to brand me for life?
I pocket the coin and play on.
Folk drop by until the yard is thrumming and the sound of my strumming is lost. Al switches to Santana on the hi-fi. I’m off the hook.
Lotte slides folded money into my jeans’ ass-pocket. She begs me to stay longer.
And not all the folk are shallow and crass. A few are cool. There’s a woman doctor who sees hope for curbing HIV after Mandela’s 46664 concert in Cape Town. And then there’s this zany bald actor called Sjaka (a white Sjaka?!).
And yet I am only half-tuned into dialogue. The recurring riff in my mind is: Who am I, a stranger and a coloured, to waltz into her white world?
Joints glow and float from finger to finger. I toke too and the world warps weirdly. The moon is a Chinese lantern. The stars are scattered fireflies. A hosepipe snakes through the frangipani to spit water at girls till their dresses echo their skin and their nipples jut.
And Lotte spins in slow-mo as fairy lights cast psychedelic tints over her.
I lose her for a long time, then somehow I am on the sofa beside her. In front of a covey of her girlfriends, I beg her to slide off her diamond ring. It blinks in my palm. Then I form a fist and when I unfurl my fingers again there’s just a frangipani flower instead. Other girls go
oooh
and she smiles tenuously. She’s half enchanted, half scared I may pinch the ring.
Sometime around midnight a random girl rubs champagne in my hair.
Sometime way after midnight the frangipani falls with one macho swing of a long-bladed
panga
. Lotte sobs and Al begs her not to be so theatrical.
The frangipani is hauled into the house and stood up in a deep Chinese vase. Boys cajole girls to peel off their panties and hang them up in it. One girl fleetingly moons the boys. They howl like wolves.
Now panties hang from the frangipani like Tibetan prayer flags.
Lotte runs out of the yard onto the sea path. No one notices as they are all too caught up in grooving to an old Toto song. The fact that all the girls are nude under their skirts keys up the vibe and the boys jam hard.
I recall Zero dancing years ago in Amsterdam with such gusto that he went through the floorboards like Rumpelstiltskin.
I snatch up my guitar and follow Lotte.
She runs barefoot along the path to the old harbour, her white dress flapping in the cold sea wind.
I catch up with her on the old harbour slipway.
– I’m sorry about your frangipani.
She wipes liquid from her eyes with her palms.
– It was planted when I was born. Just a few days ago it bore oranges out of the blue ...
The wind, whistling in the hollow of my guitar, echoes my lust for her.
– ... and I sense it had something to do with you.
– Lotte, I fell for you the moment I saw you under a haze of flapping gulls. I love a myriad things about you: the way your soles peel so languidly, so subtly off the cool tiles of your veranda, the way you fold your feet up under you so felinely. I love the slant of your eyebrows, like wind-bent dune grass. And I love the whisper of freckles on your cheeks.
She stares out to sea and nibbles the skin of her lower lip. I can tell she’s vacillating, as if she’s teetering on a high wire. Then she swings her head to face me.
– Kiss me, before I change my mind.
– And Al?
– He’s a sweet guy, but he’d kill you with his bare hands if he caught you.
This just proves old Hunter’s right as a southern right. Things can get hazardous.
I kiss the silky skin under her ear. I comb my fingers through her hair and float my lips over her forehead, then kiss her fluttering eyelids.
The sea riots against the barricade of the harbour wall. A shooting star falls like a shot flare. A distant baboon or freak dog barks at that lantern of a moon.
My cock yearns hard for pink nirvana.
I kiss her lips. Our tongue tips tango viscously.
We huddle down in the lee of the harbour wall on my rugby jersey. I am bare to my jeans.
Moonfleet stalks over to sniff us. Lotte giggles at the tickle of his whiskers on her skin. Then he curls into the curve of my guitar.
She draws my hand under her dress. I feel the cold swell of her breasts under my palm. Her voice falls a few octaves to become sandy in my ear.
– You smell of champagne, she says.
She lays herself out flat before me.
I’m aware this may be a warped revenge for the felling of her frangipani rather than any deep love for me, yet I lingeringly lick her slightly salty cowrie shell. I am an awed artist tentatively painting the face of a Buddha.
L
ONG STREET, CAPE TOWN.
Yet another day of stalking his fortune and eluding Ghost Cowboy.
Crook hand hidden in his pocket, Jabulani doffs his hat to fellow Zimbabwean interlopers with his good hand. He licks the smell of coffee out of the air. His bones click and catch after another night in the paper bin in a courtyard behind a bookshop.
He’d put a coin under the lid to let a draft in: a fusion of sewer and gas and rat and rotting fruit. A gecko slid through the crack and skittered elusively among the scrap paper and flat boxes. He dreamed it was rats in the roof again and that he was in Thokozile’s arms. He was so sublimely happy in his dream that when a dog toppled a reeking bin at dawn, Jabulani swung his lid up to curse him. His hand found a Canon ink cartridge and he flung it. It hit a wall, spitting out flecks of magenta. Then he fell into yet another dream: this time of his old cat swinging from a string. His cry yanked him out of this fitful dream, scattering gulls that haggled like fishwives over spilt junk.
Now the jangle of church bells in his ears reminds him of his school in Bulawayo.
In his mind he sees Panganai and Tendai in school, hiding their scabby shoes under their desks, borrowing paper from others, dodging questions about their father. Then he sees Thokozile scavenging for their tuck.
Just as something wild in him wants to howl against the injustice of things in this world, a pigeon lands on his head. He interprets this as yet another good omen.
Then the pigeon flaps away to land on the roof of an old green Benz.
He filches a newspaper and a stained, floppy banana out of a bin. He stands in a shaft of sun in front of a bookshop reading the paper and letting the fragrant banana melt on his tongue. He reads stories of rage and blood shot through with the cocky call of the pigeon.
He feels snide eyes glide over him as fancy folk go by. A man in white flip-flops eating a dangling-skinned banana like a monkey, yet reading the
Cape Times
as if he has a job at a desk in one of the tall buildings that scratch the sky overhead.
To avoid sliding into gloom he drops the banana skin (hoping one of the smug men in fine flannels will wipe out) and focuses on the pigeon again. This comical, moth-eaten bird croons as if he’s the Bono of birds. You can tell he thinks he’s the thing all girl birds dream of.
He hears glass clink and looks up from the paper to see a man in a parrot-vivid Hawaiian shirt and snakeskin boots putting a box of whisky into the boot of his Benz.
The pigeon flies off.
His eyes are about to revert to the newspaper when he sees, out the corner of his eye, the sun glint off the blade of a knife. Somehow time warps out like a tape left too long in the sun. Jabulani sees a hand follow that blade out of shadow.
The wind tugs at the falling newspaper.
By the time the newspaper lands, Jabulani’s dived the knife-guy down. He hits him low and hard.
The knife spins through the air.
A head bangs into a hubcap.
Zero jumps at this cymbal
boom
. He draws his Colt 45 and swings it wildly.
A woman drops to the pavement, wailing:
No shooooot!
Then Zero sees all. Him on the pavement at his feet. Out cold. Blood slipping from a slit in his head. And him with white flip-flops and one hand bound up like a boxer’s.
Zero pockets his cowboy gun and helps the now jibbering woman to her feet.
– Sorry, mother. Sorry.
His voice calms her fears. He puts money in her hands. She shuffles on, mumbling to her god.
Jabulani dusts off his shirt and studies his hand where the blood inks through the cloth again.
Zero flicks the knife-guy over with his foot.
Just a boy. Maybe as young as Jero.
His eyelids flutter. His finger dabs at the slit. Then his eyes pop out white as pool balls at the sight of the blood. Then he’s gone all lopsided, skedaddling along on all fours like a darted monkey.
Zero laughs.
Jabulani’s amazed.
– Why’d you let him go?
– Jail will just further fuck him up. And I’m not in the mood to put him in the boot. I need time to think this out.
His hands shake as he lights a Camel.
– I’m fazed, I tell you.
– You want one?
– Ta.
– I always thought there was a hoop of luck around me.
– Maybe I’m your luck.
In a café on Greenmarket Square:
ZERO
: You saved my skin.
JABULANI
: Forget it.
ZERO
: You crazy? How can I forget the fact that I’d be gone if not for you?
He pans his eyes over the market as if to encompass all the things he’d be gone from.
ZERO
: I want to help you. You have a job?
JABULANI
: I’m looking for a job.
ZERO
: You have papers?
JABULANI
: No. Just my wits.
ZERO
: That’s tricky.
JABULANI
: I’ll find something.
ZERO
: Where are you from?
JABULANI
: Zimbabwe.
ZERO
: I am sorry for you. Zimbabwe’s fucked.
Just then a Zimbabwean drifts by, offering spindly giraffes to café-goers.
ZERO
: It’s a fucking diaspora.
Jabulani just nods at this bald fact.
ZERO
: What kind of a job?
JABULANI
: I’d love to teach again. But after being put down and spat at in this town, that feels like a pipe dream. I’d wax your Benz. I’d be your coffee boy. I’d carry your whisky crates. You see, I need to wire money to my family.
ZERO
: So, you’re a teacher.
JABULANI
: English.
ZERO
: English teachers are two a penny. It’s hard to find a post. But perhaps I can rig a job for you somehow. The way you decked that guy! Your instincts are honed, man. From now on you’ll shadow me wherever I go. And I’ll deal with the paperwork.
JABULANI
: I need a place to stay.
ZERO
: I said
wherever
. My son’s just shifted out. You can stay in his room. He loves books ... books by South Americans and Indians.
JABULANI
: And your wife?
ZERO
: She no longer reads.
JABULANI
: But how will she feel about having a stranger under her roof?