– But how’d you get a foot in the door?
– I did things. Cruel things. Crazy things.
There’s a long, laden lull punctuated by the electric clicks of grasshoppers.
– Hey Phoenix, how come Zero risks his life again and again to fight this war of his?
– It was the year of freedom and Zero was on a high. I was not in the picture then, but this is how the story goes. His daughter took the train to Muizenberg to go swim in the sea. Miriam was always wary of her travelling alone but Zero laughed at her fears. Somewhere between Muizenberg station and the sea, maybe somewhere along the Zandvlei lagoon, a man jumped her. They found her in the dunes beyond Khayelitsha. She was bare. She had scratches on her face that looked like the claw marks of a leopard. And her hands were marred.
Jabulani pictures Tendai so innocently hula-hooping in a world riddled with evils she can’t yet imagine.
– The police did not find the killer. Years later, this was while I was hiding in Zero’s attic, there was a report in the paper about a young girl killed in Langa. Again they found leopard marks on her. There was a lot in the papers about the Leopard Killer striking again. Some folk thought that he literally morphed into a leopard at night. This time he was sloppy and did not see the old tramp lying zonked out in the shadows on cheap
shebeen
beer. He was too shit scared to come forward, this old tramp, fearing the police would put the blame on him. But I found him, and a bottle of White Horse was all it took to get the low-down on the killer: his lagging left foot, the moonlit diamond in his tooth. It took half a year to track him down. In all this time the police had no luck. Maybe they saw it as just another murder docket in this land plagued by murder.
Jabulani looks down on the vineyards and china-blue dams below and thinks:
How ironic that a land so beautiful can be so bloodthirsty.
– But let me tell you, Jabulani, I have never seen a man beg like he did to be put out of his pain.
He puts his hand into a pocket and pulls out a bit of paper. He gingerly unfolds it. Then Jabulani sees the sun glint in a diamond pinched between his fingertips.
C
HRISTMAS EVE, 2004. HERMANUS
new harbour. After dusk.
Lotte comes in to Quayside Cabin with Al Pike and Zippo Dude.
My heart pummels against my ribs.
Al shoots a smile my way. To the other guys I am just a live jukebox.
Lotte’s eyes flicker over me (the soles of my feet tingle), then she turns her gaze to the harbour where Buyu is hand-lining with the bus boys in the paling light (my feet go dead).
I play fervidly for her and yet she never tunes in. Her eyes shift from one to another without ever falling on me. At the end of a song her fingers flutter flippantly over her palm.
The skin of her thigh ripples like seersucker where it catches on the bench and her white dress rides high. She loves me.
She winds a rogue thread from the hem of her dress round a finger and snaps it. She loves me not.
She tips a pinch of salt onto the foot of the glass and dabs at it with a licked fingertip. She loves me.
She holds a cool wine glass to her forehead. She loves me not.
She sucks a mussel out of its black shell. She stabs at a whitebait with her fork and pops it, head, gut and fin, into her mouth. She loves me.
She studies the tacky flotsam hanging from the roof, her eyes lingering on a red Dali crayfish. She loves me not.
I envy that damn crayfish that catches her eye.
I play Coldplay blind. In my mind’s eye I see the lazy sway of her hips before me, a Savanna bottle dangling from her fingers. Folk go on swigging beer and chattering. I alone see her concertina her dress in her free hand until it reveals her unfussy cowrie cleft. I alone see the fabric draw up higher still to free her nipples, sushi-salmon pink. I alone see her slide a sliver of lime subtly over her shell and shiver at the sting of it.
And then the song’s over and she’s thumbing a lime down into her Savanna.
Out on the dark harbour Buyu and the others have abandoned their fishing to play a game with bottle tops. I see a tourist taking photos of the boys. A cormorant dives from the mast of a fishing boat and surfaces with a fish sparking silver in the flashlight of a camera.
I wish I was free to just dive for the thing I yearn for.
A waiter puts a cold beer down on my amp.
– Cheers, I say.
– Sent over by the man in the far corner.
I lift the bottle of Windhoek and look into Al’s eyes. He nods. A hint of a sly smile lurks in his lips. The way he holds my gaze, I’d swear he feels it in his bones: that I have fucked his girl. Perhaps he pities me for being so madly hooked, for he does not kiss her in front of me like a dog marking out his hood. I wish he was an asshole, so I’d feel no guilt as he and I enact a mock clinking of glass against glass in the air and then each swig a gulp in sync.
Lotte’s cheeks hollow as she sucks a cocktail of ice cream and Kahlúa through a straw.
Zippo Dude lights a glass of sambuca and swigs it down as it flames.
Al foots the bill.
As they go I see her scribble something on a coaster with the bill biro.
I abandon my playing midflow to save the coaster before a waiter can whisk it away.
I gaze over the wall into her yard. I see static shadow figures behind the curtains. I see her form drifting to and fro. Then she’s on the veranda, sliding her feet into sandals, fluttering over the grass.
– A film.
Pulp Fiction
. Al’s a Tarantino aficionado. They’re killing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I’ve maybe a quarter of an hour before Al figures out I’m gone.
I follow her down a rogue path to rocks by the sea.
– Surfers cut through and jump from the rocks at high tide.
Waves fling their moon-lust at the rocks. Junk (beer bottles, Bic lighters, shotgun hulls, Red Bull shots, a jilted flip-flop, a tangle of fishing gut) is caught in the rock cracks.
She yanks down my Bermudas, bids me lie down on a flat rock. She ties my hands over my head with the fishing gut. I feel the balmy breath from her mouth on my lips. I feel the rock scratch my spine and the gut cut into my skin. She unzips me and I am in her mouth and I’m floating ... until I see a rat just a yard from my left foot. I am in a catch-22. I sense I’m just a few notches away from nirvanic abandon and that the slightest shift in vibe will put her dream tempo out of kilter. All I need to do is stay cool and focused, shut out the rat’s quivering whiskers and beady eyes. I pinch my toes against the inevitable jab of pain as its incisors punch into my skin. In the end raw fear overrides lust and she feels me go slack.
I see the quizzical slant of her brow as she spits me out.
– No good?
The rat’s gone galley west and I wonder if she’ll think I dreamed it.
– It was magic ... but there was a rat. I’m sorry.
– That was to be your Christmas gift. From your white angel.
She tames her dress and combs her fingers through her hair.
– I love you, I tell her.
She just kisses me on the forehead. I shut my eyes to imbibe her scent. When I look again she’s gone, leaving me to free my hands with my teeth.
I feel deserted, robbed, gutted. At the thought of him lying over her on white linen in a ratless space, I want to choke myself with the fishing line.
C
HRISTMAS DAY, 2004
. N1 highway, heading north through the Karoo.
Jabulani rides shotgun beside old Zero in his mystic-green Benz through a land of yellow and ochre and olive tones. Behind them Canada Dry’s shooting play-play shots at lone birds on telegraph poles.
Phoenix and Dove Bait follow in the Jeep Cherokee.
They go through lonely
dorps
each with their high church, butchery, dim hotel, glass-finned jail, take-away café. In the windows of shut shops they see tacky tinsel and fake snow. The streets are deserted. All the folk are in church in this good, god-fearing land.
Jabulani has a feeling of unreality. As if he’s in a dream. Not too long ago he was in a school where there was a low risk of being killed. A boy might snap his collarbone in rugby or twist his foot in the long jump. A teacher might trip over a school bag left in the hallway or fall off his bicycle. None had ever died. This is kamikaze crazy: heading for a shoot-out with the devil. He wants to beg Zero to spin the Benz around ... but if he does he’ll be forever haunted by the caught Zimbabweans: zombie-eyed, stoop-spined, lost to the world. Jabulani imagines them imagining him in Cape Town: a mouth full of fish and wine, their hard lot on that death farm the furthest thing from his mind.
Jabulani calls up an image of Miriam alone with her gnomes and cat. Zero had found a waterfront bar that would hire the two Zimbabwean girls over Christmas and New Year. They just wanted pretty girls; otherwise Jabulani would have jumped at the job. He’d far rather carry beers over his head to tourists than tote a gun for handouts from Zero. Then again, if he’s to be frank,
handouts
is perhaps too cynical a word for the good money he’d earned so far on jobs where he’d been just a fumbling, unneeded tagger-on.
Miriam. He finds her sallow skin and far-gazing eyes beautiful. He is puzzled by Zero’s curt, offhand way with her. No doubt it has to do with the girl they lost. Perhaps Miriam had not let him into her sorrow then. And that had sapped their love dry. He flinches at the thought of Zero making love to her. Him, bulky as a rugby hooker, seesawing over the fulcrum of her fragile hips.
He has fallen in his own eyes. He’s always thought of himself as a good father and a faithful lover, yet now he’s curious – no, keen – to feel his dark skin yin-yang with hers, subtly opaque and silky, to hold her opaline tits in his palms.
As if reading his thoughts, Zero swings the Benz hard off the road, shooting up smoky dust.
They picnic on Kentucky and ice-cold Black Label beer under bluegums.
The sun burns down on the tar. A curious buzzard eyes them from a telegraph pole. A few white woolly dots at the foot of a distant windmill. Otherwise no hint of life.
But now a hazy scarecrow figure drifts into focus. A bony old music-maker in a dusty top hat and a floppy suit plucking a tune from his guitar and singing along: a freewheeling, flirty yet lackadaisical tune riddled with recurring cow-cajoling whistles. He reconfigures time to his whim, this black Dylan, and so walks the long miles without the measure of distance sapping his vigour. He’s so lost in his mesmeric groove that he would have gone by without blinking an eyelid had the dog on his heels not barked.
They all stare at this phantom, this relic of a vanishing Africa. Jabulani has heard of Zulu
maskandi
minstrels, just as he has heard of Indian holy men who can float in the air. Such a man is not just nomadic busker, but poet, prophet, storyteller and walking history book. But why on earth is he on a road so far from KwaZulu-Natal? The world is standing on its head.
Zero offers him a Kentucky drumstick and a tall boy of beer. Tells him:
Happy Christmas
.
The man tips his hat for this
Christmas box
and walks on. He hands the drumstick to the dog. Jabulani wonders if he survives on liquid alone, like an air plant or the myth of a Masai surviving on blood and milk. He walks on along the mustard dust between the jagged rim of the tar and the riot of cosmos.
Jabulani feels a sudden pang for the red dust of Zimbabwe and wonders if he will ever see her again.
C
HRISTMAS DAY, 2004. HERMANUS
. Before dawn.
Buyu and I pick cannas and hibiscus along the cliff path. We fill a wine box with the petals.
We scatter the petals on the grass on front of her house, then hide.
The seagulls and sparrows call her out.
She wanders barefoot out over the mosaic of petals, yellow, orange and red. She flings bread to the gulls and sparrows and
dassies
.
Al comes out onto the veranda, a mug of smoking coffee in hand.
– Magic, hey? says Lotte.
– Looks like an Indian funeral, says Al.
Buyu and I ride the Vespa out past Fisherhaven to Kleinmond for Christmas lunch.
Flamingos fly like a school of pink fish through the blue of the sky.
The water level has sunk low in the Fisherhaven lagoon. Wild horses drift through a sea of red amphibian flowers.
How weird, to spend half the year underwater dreaming of the sun.
We picnic down on the Kleinmond slipway. I have takeaway tuna sushi with flamingo-pink ginger and a beer. Buyu (who laughs at my forking out good money for uncooked fish) has fish and chips and Sprite.
Seagulls hustle Buyu for the chips. They too scorn my sushi.
The sea is alluringly blue, yet kelp sways darkly below her skin.
One lone penguin weaves through the kelp.
Buyu wanders down to the water. He pinches a crab between my chopsticks and holds it up for me to see.
– Free sushi, he jokes.
I laugh, though in my gut I feel robbed of Lotte.
Buyu lets the crab go.
He skips crab-flat stones over the surface of the water. I imagine he’s remembering a lakeshore in Tanzania. I wonder if his mother’s hanging on.
And I think of my mother. How she, so adored by her tacky dwarves, may feel less lonely than me.
I shut my eyes against the falling sun. In the psychedelic red sea behind my eyelids, I see a kind of dancing, four-handed Kali: nude, fanged and red-eyed. Her skin changes colour, now blue, now black. In one hand she holds a gun, in another a
panga
, in another diamonds, in yet another gold. She has a string of skulls hanging from her head. The dusty skulls of Biko and other folk killed by apartheid. The shiny skulls of folk who thought freedom would kill all the old demons. And one skull of a girl whose fingers wizardly turned string into diamonds or a cat’s eye or a star.
B
OXING DAY, 26 DECEMBER
2004. Somewhere south of the Limpopo. Before sunrise.
For miles now they have been cruising. Jabulani’s head juts out the wound-down window, his eyes peeled for the sun-bleached ox skull on a pole. He fears they may have gone too far. That it somehow eluded him. Perhaps it hangs at such an angle that it does not reflect light if you travel from the south. Nina had been heading south then. Or perhaps Ghost Cowboy got rid of the thing in the veld, for it was Jabulani’s sole signpost to the farm. He curses himself for not having put down another marker ... a pyramid of stones, or a snatch of cloth tied to the barbed wire.