– You love cats, she murmurs.
– Never seen this kind.
– A Bengal. Foreign.
– Like me, Jabulani smiles.
– Where are you from?
– Zimbabwe.
– I am not scared of you.
– That’s good. All I want is to earn money to send to my wife and children.
– You have children?
– A son and a daughter. Still at school. I gather you have a son.
– I had a daughter.
Jabulani feels as if he’s walking along that high beam again.
– I am sorry for your loss ... What happened to her?
She back-pedals, gathering her dress in a fist until it hardly covers her hips.
– Why?
– Sorry.
She spits out a rueful laugh and rocks on her heels. She winds her hair up with her free hand.
He lets the cat slide to the grass and enfolds her in his arms.
She flinches. After a time she lets her hair fall.
From the window Phoenix sees a dispersed Zimbabwean holding a pining Jew: two lonely, diasporic souls clutching at each other in a hard, spurning world.
H
ERMANUS. AFTER MIDNIGHT.
Buyu and I walk along the cliff path to her house.
The sea is curiously calm.
There’s a hint of indigo in the gull-less sky. And the moon hangs like a pearl from Scorpio’s hooked tail.
That raw frangipani stump in her front yard is empirical evidence I did not dream her.
There’s a risk folk will report seeing two dodgy characters loitering on a wall, but we sit on it anyway, all foot-swinging and tomcat-cocky.
I pluck my guitar. I see her shadow glide behind filmy white curtains. Then, for a long time, there’s no hint of her.
Buyu lies down flat on the wall and stares up at the stars.
I play on till I conjure her shadow again. Now it stays and sinuously lilts. Lotte subtly swaying her hips to my music? Or just a slight breeze drifting along the curtains?
Buyu dozes off, his eyes white under slit lids, his feet jigging like a dreaming dog’s.
Between tunes I hear an owl calling
hoo hoo
, the zither of mosquitoes and the snarl of Buyu’s breath over the listless sighing of a low tide.
Now lights in the house go out. For a long time it’s dark behind the curtains. I am about to abandon this futile serenading and to joggle Buyu awake when the curtains slide apart, just a few inches, maybe a foot.
Caught naked in the moonlight, she’s an angel between two vast white wings.
Forgive me if this riles you, O Professor, but this is how I define beautiful.
B
LOEMFONTEIN. AFTERNOON.
A mystic-green Benz coasts through the town.
Zero’s drumming his palms on the rim of the wheel to the beat of a Midnight Oil song.
Phoenix rides shotgun, his face a stoic mask.
Canada Dry and Jabulani sit in the back of the Benz. Canada Dry spins a revolver on his finger. Now and then he aims at a random dog or a bird on a wire and goes
pow-pow, pow-pow!
Dove Bait they left in Cape Town to keep an eye on Miriam and her rat-taunting cat and the happy-go-lucky gnomes. Besides, he’d lose his head around young girls.
Zero halts a block beyond the Cherokee butcher’s shop. He goes in for
boerewors
.
The butcher is paring a sheep down to flat chops with a bandsaw that now whines as it cuts through bone, now hums as it glides through flesh, now whines, now hums. He abandons his sawing, wipes blood off his hands.
–
Middag
.
– Afternoon. That’s a cool jeep you got out front.
–
Ja
. There’s few in these parts.
– Aha.
– You have a wish?
–
Boerewors
. Two coils.
– You want spicy?
– Spicy’s good.
The butcher parcels the
boerewors
in Manila paper. He tallies up the cost with a pencil on the paper.
Zero hands over a few notes. The
tinging
of the till is a sound from Zero’s youth. This place is a time warp. Yellow flypaper spiralling down from the roof. A standing steel fan swivelling and rattling. A
Scope
pin-up of a skinny white girl in a bikini flaunting fat tits. Johnny Cash singing on the radio.
There’s no sign that this is post-apartheid South Africa, apart from a fading shot of a jubilant Mandela in a Springbok rugby shirt (rather uncoolly buttoned all the way up) after the Boks beat the All Blacks back in 1995 ... just a year after freedom. And then the fact that he, a coloured, is being served without the butcher batting an eyelid.
– That game came down to the wire, hey? Zero remarks, nodding at the photo of Mandela
–
Ja
. You saw it?
– I was overseas. Saw it in an Irish pub in Amsterdam full of bloody
rooineks.
They all yelled for the All Blacks. No one was for us then, hey?
–
Ja
. The world was against us.
– When that ball flew through the posts, I tipped the rest of my beer over my head and went out onto the banks of the Amstel and danced a jig.
The butcher laughs.
– You wouldn’t want to sell me that jeep of yours?
– No. But there’s a farmer out at a farm called Jakkalspan. His jeep’s all scarred and dented. I wonder where the hell he goes with that thing. Maybe he would sell.
– How can I find this farmer?
– Here. I’ll draw the way out for you.
– You can’t call him?
– He has no telephone. He’s like one of those Indian kermits hiding away in a cave.
Zero smiles at his fumbling of
hermit
. He’ll have to tell Jero. It’ll kill him.
At a 7-Eleven they pick up buns and tomatoes.
Just beyond town they ride along a rutted road. They go past a fat-hipped woman with a baby cocooned against her spine and a plastic keg of water on her head.
Further on they go past a few zinc shanties huddling in the sketchy shade of a stand of bluegums. Colourful washing hangs out on barbed wire and smoke unspools from a fire. Boys play football barefoot with a tennis ball. Girls play a game akin to hopscotch, where they hop on one foot and hold their other foot by the heel. There’s a paradoxical holiday mood, as if they are camping by the sea instead of along a dirt road.
One girl shoots through a hole in the wire at the sight of the Benz and runs in their dust wake. She has no hope of catching them, yet she runs as if a mad dog’s on her heels.
Jabulani thinks:
Just a few days ago I was running hard and headlong as that girl.
After half a mile Zero halts the Benz and winds down his window.
The girl now catches up, halts a few yards short, stares warily at them. There’s no telling if folk will toss pennies or stones.
– You are fast, young girl, Zero tells her. You go on running like this you’ll become a Zola Budd.
For her a Zola Budd’s a taxi. She’s never heard of the barefoot runner. But a taxi’s a zoom-along thing, so she flashes dazzling teeth at Zero.
He holds out a note. She skips up to him and curtsies for the money.
– Stay well, girl.
– Go well, sir.
They go on, slowing at the sign of the farm they are looking for: Jakkalspan. Then they go on another mile or so until they find a bridge over a river. Zero parks the Benz under a bluegum.
They make a fire out of newspaper and driftwood down on the river sand. They cook the
boerewors
and put it on the buns with slices of tomato. They down Black Label beer from an icebox.
Jabulani and Canada Dry strip down to their jockeys and swim in the river.
Zero lies on his shirt and sings along to a song by Masekela about a woman floating through the marketplace like a butterfly. He thinks about Jero in the market in Hermanus. Phoenix told him Jero’s cool. But he wonders how his life will pan out. He hopes having to hustle to survive will kill that fool dream of his of becoming a poet. He hopes he’ll find a good girl who never goes cold on him. And he hopes, above all, Jero will never have to scatter the ashes of his child, the way he had to.
Jabulani and Canada Dry chuck a tennis ball to each other over the surface of the river. They dive and
whoop
like schoolboys until they both lie winded and worn out on the sand.
Jabulani rewinds the call he put through to Bulawayo from Zero’s telephone. He had to beg folk from over the road to call Thokozile. Their telephone had been cut off long ago. He’d heard them call her name. And then he’d heard her panting in his ear and he’d imagined her breath hot as a dog’s on his skin. And he did not tell her about the marijuana farm or his being shot or about a falling monkey-gobbler. All he said was that he was in Cape Town and that it was beautiful beyond words and that he’d found a way to earn money doing odd jobs and would wire money for Christmas. She’d sobbed and he’d told her he loved her, that she was never out of his mind, and he’d vowed he’d come for them soon. He’d been stoic until he put the telephone down. And then he’d gone out in the dark and climbed down into the empty pool. He’d lain face flat on the pool floor. He’d felt the memory of the sun seep into his skin. He’d heard the dogs of the hood bark their tom-tom poetry at the moon. He’d felt his ribs would snap with the soul pain that bore down on him, splaying his feet and hands out. To bats hunting lamp-dazzled moths, he may have looked like a skydiver falling through a faded blue sky.
And the sandpapery tongue of a Bengal cat licking dry salt from his face had lured him to lift his eyes to the sight of Miriam dancing alone under the moon. Curiously, it felt like so long ago, like a déjà vu from another lifetime.
And now the falling sun is a flaming, tacky pink, just like the end of a cowboy flick.
H
ERMANUS.
Time blurs on her cool, white floor. A sketchy, sepia light is cast through the fat fingers of the cut frangipani. The sea, wind-warped, sings in my ears.
I felt guilty sending Buyu alone to the flat. But if he survived
gumagumas
and rabid dogs, then the path was not too risky: just a crabby professor and snakes to dodge.
He was all sparky in the market all day, hustling and skipping while I sipped sour black coffee.
Now, as my eyes pan along her paintings, they turn into film shots:
Drops of blood, spat like viscous Tabasco from the eyes of a mermaid onto her breasts, travel down towards her belly button. But before they arrive a stray dog laps them up off her skin.
White pigeons fly out of a pussy (her?) and a fantasy animal (half hyena, half Tasmanian devil?) bares jagged fangs and catches them out of the sky with a long, lurid tongue.
A vulture dips its head into the carcass of a seal and bobs up all red-skulled and gleeful.
A shark glides below an unwitting, wingless girl swimming on the surface of a lagoon ...
I avert my eyes to focus on her. I want to lose myself in her the way I got lost in the mind of García Márquez. I put my ear to the lee of her hipbone and hear bubbles gurgle below her skin. My cock goes hard as cuttlebone. I swivel her and hold her heels high. Her nude love-flower lurks shyly between folded petals. I kiss this flower until it blooms to fill out my palm.
I let her heels go and her knees fall akimbo to flare a hint of pink.
Just her, her bizarre paintings and a dying frangipani. No dog or cat. No flowers.
– How come you stay here all alone?
– My mother died a few years ago. My father’s away. He’s a professor at a university in New York. I see him during his long summer holidays. We go for long walks along the path and go to Quayside Cabin for whitebait. And Al I see on weekends. I’m not too lonely in between.
I skirt away from the topic of Al.
– And no flowers or cats?
– I want the freedom to walk out without anything dying. Sometimes I go to Cape Town for a few days on a whim and stay at in my father’s flat in Hout Bay. You look down on the harbour. If the wind blows off the sea it reeks from all the fish killing. But the view’s beautiful.
– I imagine the birds and
dassies
pine for you when you’re gone.
– Perhaps. But they survive.
Will I? I wonder.
– Tell me about your paintings.
– I don’t talk about my paintings. That’d be deciphering them for you ... telling you how to look.
I’m scared of saying something uncool, so I just let her words float.
– But I’ll tell you why I love hazardous art.
– Hazardous?
– Hazardous. It rents this kind of sharky, cavernous place in your head. Its edges are like some smoky vapour.
I glance at the painting of the shark: jaw unhooked and eyes coldly smug.
– And yet that’s not it either. There isn’t a language for it. It sounds crazy ...
– No. Not crazy.
I snuff at the skin behind an ear foetal-folded and cool-rimmed. She sighs. Art is forgotten. And I sigh too, for I am in no mood to follow her into that sharky place now.
– This is a dream. You and me. A magical dream, yet there’s no future for us. You see that, don’t you? I don’t want you hurting.
– Why just a dream? My dark skin?
– You crazy? I love the yummy colour of your skin: halfway between butternut and cinnamon. It’s just that Al and I have a long history. I fell for him when I was still a schoolgirl and he was a student at Wits. It was so cool to cruise around Jozi in a convertible
MG
with this older guy who took me to arthouse films and hip bars.
She smiles, recalling perhaps a vision of a younger Lotte, wind-tousled and high on the whirl of a now-vanishing Johannesburg. To cruise around in a convertible these days is begging to be hijacked or shot through your Ray-Banned head.
– It’s just that he no longer makes my blood fizz when he makes love to me.
I sulk.
– I just can’t imagine him tuning into you the way I do. He doesn’t seem the arthouse type.
– He saw the films for me. That’s a measure of his love. He may seem a bit fuddy-duddy and old-line on the surface. But he’s sharp, and honest to the bone. And he’s never hurt me. This sounds shallow and crass, but he’s made a lot of money and that frees us to travel the world, rather than feeling trapped on the edge of it. I want to paint the Taj Mahal and Uluru. I want to put up my paintings in London and New York. I want to hang out in Bali and die in Mexico.