Durban Poison

by Ben Trovato

  It was late on a cold winter’s night when Stanlib met African Bank on the frigid fringes of the fiscal market where only the rats run, and flashed a bag of cash that wasn’t theirs to start with. African Bank grabbed its assets and smirked.

  “Hey, babe. You wanna invest? C’mon. Give it to me. You know you want to.”

  “But, sir, this is other people’s money. I really shouldn’t.”

  “Trust me. I’m an African bank.”

  “Okay. Promise to call me in the morning?”

  It’s those Stanlib sluts who should take the hit, not people like me. Absa sheeple got done over, too. If we had any money left, we might have filed a class action lawsuit.

  Lumbering to my feet and yanking the consultant’s pen off its chain, I demanded to know why the bank hadn’t notified me before ransacking my account.

  “Everything happened very fast and we had to move quickly to protect our clients,” he said nervously. Oh, well, why didn’t you say so?

  The next time I see a man in an expensive suit walking down the road, I’ll hit him with a bag of rocks and grab his briefcase. “I’m doing this to protect you,” I will shout over my shoulder as I run off down the road.

  I might even expose myself to him.

  TESTES! TESTES! ONE, TWO, THREE ...

  Ever since I was a little boy, I never wanted to be a doctor. I couldn’t understand why anyone would choose a career that involved surrounding yourself with sick and dying people. Years later I bumped into an old school friend. We caught up over a couple of beers. I told him I’d gone into journalism.

  “Makes sense,” he said. “You always were good at English.” I didn’t really care what he did because there was nothing sexier or more interesting than journalism. Still, I asked out of politeness.

  “I’m a doctor,” he said. I nodded and stifled a yawn. “Makes sense,” I said. “You always were good at …” My voice trailed off. I couldn’t remember him having been particularly good at anything at school. Sure, he was better at exams than I was. But then so was most of the school.

  We walked to the parking lot, shook hands and agreed to meet up again soon. I went to my dented Toyota Yaris while he boarded his Mercedes SLK.

  Knowing what I do now, would I still choose journalism over medicine? Absolutely. Journalists and doctors encounter a lot of sick people in their careers. But at least I get to expose them, destroy their lives and move on to the next story. A doctor can get stuck with them for years.

  Sick people get on my nerves. They never stop complaining. If they’re not getting cramps, they’re suffering from nausea. If it’s not a runny nose, it’s emphysema. That dizziness they experience? It’s not caused by low blood pressure. It’s caused by going around telling everyone who crosses their path that they have found a lump in their armpit and that it is never too late to allow Jesus into your heart.

  I switch doctors a lot because it’s a bad idea to get overly familiar with these people. They are quick to take offence and many will not hesitate to kill you. The other day I picked a fresh one out of the phone book and became acquainted with an entirely new waiting room. People might think differently about the medical profession if they were shown to something other than a waiting room. I say get in a couple of pool tables and one-armed bandits and tell patients to wait in the games room. Or even better, the titty bar. Downing shots of ethyl alcohol while a couple of underdressed nurses shimmy up and down a silver pole would be far better for one’s health than sitting on a cheap plastic chair with the June 1978 edition of Farmer’s Weekly on one’s lap.

  If it weren’t for the BMW keys on his desk, I wouldn’t have taken him for a doctor. I might have taken him for a milkshake and then sent him back to his mother before the sun went down. That sounds wrong. What I’m trying to say is that he looked very young. Not that I make a habit of taking young boys for milkshakes. Oh, for god’s sake, stop looking at me like that.

  I tell the bright-eyed man-child that there’s nothing wrong with me. That I just want a check-up. A sort of half-century service. He looks disappointed. I feel like a neurotic hypochondriac and toy with the idea of making something up. Something exotic like blackwater fever or river blindness or even a persistent priapism. But it’s too late.

  He tells me to remove my shirt and lie down. It’s been a while since anyone spoke to me like that and I find it rather exciting. He picks up his stethoscope and eavesdrops on my heart. He says it has a murmur. I say given the number of times it has been broken, it’s probably more of a mutter than a murmur.

  He asks me to breathe deeply in and out. It has been a long time since I breathed deeply and almost immediately my vision is awash in pinpricks of light. Moments before I pass out, he tells me to breathe normally.

  “Lungs sound clear,” he says.

  What? That’s not possible. There’ve been times in my life when I have smoked anything that even remotely looked like it might burn. These can’t be happy lungs.

  He mumbles something about feeling a little prick. That’s a bit rude, I think, starting to slip my trousers off.

  “No need for that,” he says, taking my finger and puncturing it. Blood sugar levels are fine. Ears fine. Throat good. Heart sound. No mention of the prostate. Does that fall under a major service? What am I having here? A tune-up?

  I don’t know how to broach the subject without sounding like I’m asking for a finger up my bum. But I don’t want to die a slow, painful death either. I can’t make up my mind which is worse, so I avoid the subject altogether.

  “You’re healthy,” the doctor says. “I can’t imagine why you would come here and waste my time when there are genuinely sick people out there who need my help,” he thinks.

  I blush, even though he doesn’t know I can hear his internal monologue, and want to apologise. But more than that, I want to argue with him. I want to tell him that his diagnosis is wrong. That it is a physiological impossibility for me to be in perfect health, given what I’ve done over the last 30 years. He has made a terrible mistake, which I have to pay for at reception before I leave.

  On my way out, I visit the vampires so they may quite literally suck the lifeblood out of me. As it turned out, I did rather well in my tests. Sure, I only just scraped through in some areas, but who doesn’t? And I failed three, all of which had to do with cholesterol. I don’t know why these people feel the need to focus on the negative. Why not compliment me on how well I did on the lymphocytes and monocytes? I also cracked the neutrophils. And my red and white cells are getting along famously, despite coming from different backgrounds.

  My test results were accompanied by a report card. The prognosis wasn’t good. “Patient must increase levels of physical activity and eat more fruit, vegetables and nuts.” Am I now a squirrel?

  The worst was yet to come. Beneath the recommendation that I avoid eating anything with a face came the spine-chilling advice, “Consume alcohol in moderation, if at all.”

  Their twisted definition of moderation is “one or two alcoholic drinks per day”. I have never known anyone to have just one or two beers and then stop. I don’t think it’s even possible. I am so upset that I am going to pour myself a tall glass of low-density lipoproteins with a triglyceride chaser on the side and to hell with the consequences.

  THE ART OF COOKING FISH AND OTHER MUTANTS

  The Bad Yellow-Eyed Woman said she was going for an afternoon nap. And that I should buy some fish for supper. And not just a chunk of beer-battered hake deep-fried in a vat of recycled oil, which, as everyone knows, is the tastiest fish on the planet.

  She wanted real fish. From the sea, of all places. Hake, in her mind, is mass-produced by Monsanto for consumption by the poor. Fair enough. Let them eat hake.

  It’s not easy to get your hands on fresh fish these days. I suppose you could always buy a boat and some fishing gear. It would have to be a boat with an engine. You wouldn’t want to be rowing out to sea. Then you need a trailer to get the boat to the beach. By the en
d of the day, you’ve spent around R180-thousand. It seems a bit steep for a fish supper.

  Even without the boat, catching fish is a terrible mission. If you want to pick your fish, you’re going to need scuba gear and one of those underwater shotgun things. Or at least some kind of long, pointy stick you can stab the fish with when he’s not looking. I don’t have scuba gear. My whole life, people have been trying to get me to scuba. Every campsite, every bar, there’s someone telling me that I really have to learn. Apparently you need a licence. Quite frankly, I find that ridiculous. What can go wrong? Are you going to lose a flipper and veer into a passing whale? Mistake your buddy for a stumpnose and spear him in the face? I can’t see it happening.

  I don’t have time for lessons of any kind. I’d rather go out there and wing it. That’s why I stick with snorkelling. Sure, it’s a bit effeminate, but what isn’t these days? Even Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, says he’s proud to be gay. With a name like that, I bet he knows his way around a kitchen, too. Lucky man.

  I’d like to be able to say that I am proud to be heterosexual, but I can’t. I was searching the internet for recipes when I came across a website featuring women doing unspeakable things with a variety of rubber implements. I was staring male obsolescence in the – well, not quite the face, but you get my drift.

  Please try to keep up. What I’m saying is there’s no point in men wearing their heterosexuality on their sleeves, given how easy it is to replace them. The moment women learn how to wire a plug and change a tyre, we’re finished as a demographic.

  It’s appalling how a simple column about fish can be hijacked by sex. It’s everywhere. And yet nowhere.

  So. My options were limited. The Bad Yellow-Eyed Woman had failed to give me a description of the quantity or species of fish she desired. She had, however, made it clear that its eyes had to be unclouded by the disillusionment that death brings with it. The fish she wanted had to be so fresh that it would still have a quizzical look on its face as if to say, “Good heavens. Where am I? What is this terrible place?”

  Instead, those words were spoken by me. I was in a shop between the hours of 5pm and 6pm, a time when food shops everywhere are occupied by desperate women who have somehow forgotten that their duties include making sure that their families don’t starve to death. I am not going to be dragged into a squabble about the pros and cons of patriarchy and sexism. I’m not. I’m sticking with the fish. Fight among yourselves, if you must.

  The shop had two kinds of fish. At first I didn’t even recognise them as fish. I thought they might be lambs with a skin disease. The toothless crone behind the counter assured me that they were, indeed, fully paid-up members of a paraphyletic group of organisms consisting of gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals lacking limbs with digits. I asked her why she wasn’t teaching at a university. She said the fish counter paid better.

  I prodded a couple of the fish. They looked as if they were leftovers from the beach party at Bethsaida. Only Christians will get this joke. Not that Christians are wild about Jesus jokes. Maybe things have changed. The Pope just admitted that God isn’t a magician with a magic wand, so I suppose anything is possible from here on.

  I wanted to buy those fish and take them home and give them a decent Christian burial, but that would have been ridiculous. I’m not a Christian. I turned to a fellow shopper wearing some kind of cross and asked if she might not do the right thing by these poor piscine peasants. She politely pointed out that her cross was inverted and that, as a Satanist, she had no need for dead fish from a supermarket that clearly catered for idiots.

  That’s the problem with Satanists these days. Picky, picky, picky. When I was a young dog, Satanists would take whatever dead things they could get their hands on. For rituals or dinner. In my neighbourhood, the two were frequently interchangeable.

  These were simple people who hardly ever bothered with any of the really weird stuff like eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. Satanists these days tend to follow the laws of Tim Noakes rather than those of the Devil, although there are many who say they are one and the same.

  Finding myself in the Cape Peninsula’s dangerous Deep South, I sloped off to Kalk Bay harbour where I knew there to be fresh fish frequently available. Also weed. And hitmen. And a smattering of swarthy harlots as underaged as the fish were undersized.

  Most of the boats were still at sea. Those that had returned had delivered a few bunches of smallish silver fish. Around the corner, men with scarred faces and oilskins as orange as their eyes packed prime yellowtail into white plastic crates. These weren’t for sale to the likes of me. I imagined that, within 24 hours, a fillet would appear before a sheik in one or other of those weird oil-based fantasias that desecrate the Arabian Desert. It will be on a platinum platter beneath a solid gold lid. He will try a morsel, then toss his diamond-encrusted fork aside and cry, “I asked for coelacanth! Behead the chef!”

  The fish at the harbour were tied in bunches because a bunch of not-very-big fish looks more appealing than just one lying there on his own wondering why he’s having trouble breathing.

  I didn’t want to ask what they were in case the heavy-set woman doing the selling thought I was retarded. “Yes,” I would have to say, “I can see they are fish.”

  Lying slightly apart from the silver ones were some who didn’t quite fit in. They were a lovely shade of red. Well, I appreciated their colouring, anyway. It’s probably different in the ocean.

  “Oh, for Neptune’s sake! Here come those ugly bastards again. Imagine being red!”

  “Just ignore them.”

  “This is our reef. They have no business being here.”

  “Leave it. They’re bigger than we are.”

  “What we need is a shark on the payroll. That’ll put an end to this nonsense.”

  Dockside, I overheard someone say “Red Roman”. I contemplated whether this might be a code word for some or other nefarious harbour-related activity. I was reluctant to ask about the Red Roman for fear of being blindfolded and led into the hold of one of the boats where I would have to offer a good price for 50 kilograms of crystal meth or risk being chopped up and fed to the giant seals that patrolled the harbour wall.

  Then a tourist walked up, inexplicably unarmed, and asked about the Red Roman. Nothing happened to him so I followed up with my own discreet enquiries.

  “R160,” she said. Hmm. A bit pricey. Perhaps they were stuffed with cocaine. She picked up the biggish one. He had a smaller one lashed to him with one of those cable ties that American cops use when they arrest people on suspicion of being black.

  I only wanted one fish. I couldn’t understand why they had to come together. Were they related? Did they go to the same school? It felt a bit like the time I walked into an orphanage thinking it was a hotel. I asked for a double and they brought me twins.

  So now I have two Red Romans in the fridge and the Bad Yellow-Eyed Woman has gone for a Zolpidem-induced “nap”. It could be days before she surfaces. And I don’t know whether to grill, bake, boil or braai them. Thanks to masculine prerogatives and Woolies instants, I don’t understand the settings on this oven. The numbers, I get. But the other dial has hieroglyphics on it.

  Risking what little remains of my heterosexuality, I googled fish recipes and found a lot of chatter about baking and grilling, basting and roasting. As if I hadn’t had enough code words for one day. Stupidly, I clicked on Jamie Oliver’s recipes. There was no mention of Red Romans. I now know, however, how to whip up a delightful Sicilian-style tuna carpaccio. If I ever find something tight and shiny that brings out my eyes, I may well throw a little soiree for my special friends. Fish also like to be lightly brushed with olive oil. Well, darling, who doesn’t?

  Then there’s something called jerk fish. Really, Jamie? You kill fish just because they’re jerks? I wish we could do that with jerk people. And to call sea bass, fennel and grapefruit ceviche a South American classic is ridiculous. One Hundred Years of Solitud
e is a South American classic.

  Fish is supposed to be healthy. It lowers your blood pressure. It floods your body with omega-3 acids. Finding out how to cook it, on the other hand, sends your blood pressure through the roof. And makes you want to flood your brain with lysergic acid.

  Why can’t someone just come up with a fish that can cook itself? Is that so difficult, Monsanto?

  BREAD AND CIRCUSES? I’LL TAKE THE BREAD, THANKS

  I did something the other night that I haven’t done since I was a kid. No, not wet the bed. I went to the circus. It was set up on a nearby field and I didn’t have anything on so I drove down there but it wasn’t that kind of circus so I came back home and got dressed. I do apologise. Islamic fundamentalists made me say that. Ever since Charlie Hebdo in 2015, I have been desperate for things to lighten my mood. It’s not easy being a satirist these days. One can literally die laughing.

  It quickly became apparent that the circus was a metaphor for South Africa. For a start, it was a pale imitation of what I remember it to have been. I don’t mean the country was better off under apartheid. It was just a convenient way of … oh, for heaven’s sake, leave it.

  When the circus came to Durban, I remember the Big Top as being cavernous and wildly exciting. There was the smell of animals, sweat, sawdust and marijuana. And that was just my family.

  This Big Top was barely bigger than something you might expect to find at the Sodwana Bay campsite over Christmas. And it didn’t just seem smaller because I’m three times the size I was when I last went to the circus. It’s smaller because, thanks to selfish animal lovers, the arena no longer has to accommodate lions, tigers and elephants. The flying trapeze has also been done away with. Perhaps all the artists plummeted to their deaths over the years. Better than being retrenched, I suppose.