Like it Matters

by David Cornwell

  Six years

  But we caught up at the Castle Bar that night and for a while it was good, friendly and innocent—for maybe an hour—and then Phil started steering the conversation down all the old roads.

  He started asking me about cocaine. Quite casually at first, but then the more he drank, the more I could tell he was getting into the idea.

  Living in Cauvin Road, I had some neighbours I could call on. One guy, especially—Ricardo. He ran a little shop of horrors on the top floor of the block with the mural of the lady with the afro and the boom box, and he owed me good prices because once I helped him destroy his car—it was part of an insurance scam and it worked out fucking well. I picked a bag up from Ricardo, no problem, and I brought it back down for Phil and he totally overpaid me for it and then disappeared and I barely saw him again for the rest of the night.

  But then Phil came to the bar again. And then again and again and again—it must’ve been the tenth time he came in and I ducked off to Ricardo’s place for him when, finally, as I handed him the bag in the staff toilets, he said, “You’re not keen to join, hey, Ed?”

  It was so quiet that night there were times Phil and I were basically alone in the bar, and that bag didn’t even make it through my shift. Phil was talking a lot. He was on a bit of a self-pitying theme, even though his life sounded great, and it was bothering me. I knew it wasn’t completely his fault—problems are problems, sure—but still, I think I got that thing Satan had in Paradise Lost

  A sense of injured merit

  And I was purposefully zoning out whenever I could. I’d look right at him and just sing to myself in my head.

  But after the last little shot off the edge of Phil’s bank card, he was telling me about this house he’d moved into in Rondebosch, with people he barely knew and didn’t like, and how all of a sudden everything had become his job. “Like,” he said, “there’s this flat in the garden. Kak. Kak little flat. But the rest of the house is fucking kiff so we need to get someone in that flat to help us pay for the rest of the house. Four grand a month. Shit,” he said. “I spend that on coke.”

  And that was it

  An idea fired in a sour brain—he pays my rent, I get him coke—and he did nothing to temper it. In fact, in exchange for stopping by Cauvin Road and picking up another gram, he said he’d drive me back to Rondebosch that night.

  There was nothing wrong with the flat. It was great, it was perfect—it had a bed and a little desk, then a small bathroom with a toilet that worked and its own fucking shower. There was even a bar fridge in there, I just had to plug it in. God, if this is kak, I thought, don’t even let me see the house.

  And I slept deeper that night than I could remember for ages.

  But the day after—he must’ve had a beast of a hangover, if it was half as bad as mine—Phil came in to chat to me about everything and it looked like he wasn’t so sure anymore.

  He gave me all kinds of reasons, but I saw what it was.

  It was that no one else who knew him—like in the house, for sure, but maybe even beyond—knew that he did coke.

  It was plain, and I saw it the whole way along.

  I focused on that. I promised him I’d keep it cool and I did everything I could to convince him. I reminded him about how I got to Cape Town in the first place, how I’d run away and how I was still pretty sure no one knew where I was, really, not my dad, and no one from town. I told him, “Fuck, Phil, my whole life’s basically a kind of secret I keep from other people. I’m good at it, man—”

  And finally he gave in, and I guess he sealed it by telling me, “When you go out later to get the rest of your stuff, bring some back.”

  And it was working out so well—

  I managed to move a Congolese guy into my old flat and handed over the keys and I never went back to the bar, and to fill my days I was going to a couple of Phil’s classes for him because he couldn’t be fucked. I’d take his car up to that little ivy-covered planet tucked in there against the mountain and I’d sit in lectures and then go spend hours sitting on the steps, watching the most beautiful people in the world keep streaming by. And all I had to do in return was take a drive up to Ricardo’s place on the way home and then a pretty edgy one back to Rondebosch with a balloon of coke sandwiched between two pairs of underpants.

  It was a good trade and I don’t regret it

  But it all changed one afternoon in October—one cold rainy day, when the earth gave way—and from there, it was just falling and falling …

  I’d taken Phil’s car up to campus and then I’d stopped in at Ricardo’s, and I was on my way home but then at the robots in Mowbray, where the n2 merges with Main Road, there was a red light

  And it was raining hard, the wipers were going flat-out and the windows were misting up

  And there’re always so many bums hanging out at those traffic lights—

  But this time, knocking on my window, long hair, long beard, wearing a trash bag against the downpour

  Did he just shout “Ed”?

  Jesus—

  Dad?

  That’s my fucking dad, I thought, just as the light changed to green and some guy behind me started hooting.

  But how?

  What’s he doing in Cape Town?

  I don’t remember driving home to Rondebosch, but I had to get out and open the gate and then close it again when I got there—and I remember even in those two short little bursts getting soaked by the rain, and going into my room wet and cold and sweating at the same time

  And finding all the digsmates from the house sitting there on the bed. But no Phil.

  They told me to give them the drugs I had on me or else they’d call the cops. And it was horrible, so cringingly bad, but I tried to lie about everything for a while—till they told me Phil was in rehab, till they told me his dad was on his way down from Mafikeng and I needed to be out of there, for my own sake, before he got to Cape Town.

  So I told them I’d leave and I kept the balloon on me and then just packed my few things—clothes, a couple of Phil’s books, the tiny bit of money I’d managed to squirrel away by over-reporting the cost of Ricardo’s coke to Phil every time I bought it—and then I left the house in the rain, so hot with shame that my skin was steaming while I walked all the way back to Mowbray, back to the robots by the N2.

  But it was raining too hard, I suppose, and by the time I got there the regulars had already gone off to try find a dry place for the night. I kept going in the rain and I found a room at the backpackers in Observatory.

  Lying on the top bunk bed, I shivered in my wet clothes and I thought about the last time I’d spoken to my dad.

  I called him a couple of weeks after I’d moved in with Phil the first time, after we’d managed to sell off the stuff to Ken, and even back then, clueless and young, I remember this terrible double-feeling. Wanting so badly to know he was okay and to feel like I was doing right in some tiny way by calling, but at exactly the same time, wishing more than anything else in the world for that cord just to be cut forever. Whatever that actually meant.

  And that was when he’d begged me to come home—

  His voice thick with booze, or pills from the hospital, but he was begging me to come back

  And when I told him I wasn’t going to, he said, “Fine, I’ll come to Cape Town”

  And I told him, “No, Dad, don’t”

  But before I hung up, the very last thing I heard him say was, “I’m coming hey, boy—”

  Did he, Ed?

  Was that him at the robots?

  I went to shower and the thoughts followed me in there, and then I changed into clothes that’d got damp even in my backpack. I had a small bump of the coke and went down to the bar and ordered a beer and two shots and then went and sat by the fire and after a while obviously I started to feel better.

  And that night in the bar I managed to sell off half of the coke to some Belgian tourists, fresh in the country, and blatantly ripped them off

>   And then, honestly, looking back, it’s the worst part of all of this—

  I just lost a couple of days back there—

  I try think about them all the time but they’re gone, they’re really gone.

  The next thing I’ve got is waking up sober one day when the coke was finished and I hardly had any money left, delivered into a dry afternoon with the sun shining gently outside. I was feeling restless but it wasn’t for drugs. There was something eating me and eating me, and then I got it, and I went downstairs and bought a phonecard at the bar and called home off the payphone they had in the courtyard, my fingers dialling the number before I even had a chance to remember it.

  The call got connected but it just rang and rang.

  I tried four times and then I decided I’d walk up to the robots in Mowbray—Just so I can stop worrying about it, I thought.

  But then the worst thing happened.

  I asked a couple of people by the robot, this woman—her voice made me think of a hairdryer and she was so thin that for the next few days, honest to god, more than anything else, I was haunted by the idea of her trying to stand up to the wind—I asked her and this guy who lost a leg in Angola if they knew a dude who was hanging out there a few days ago with white hair and a beard

  And they told me they used to

  And I said, “What do you mean used to?”

  And between them, they told me he’d got sick the last time it’d rained, and everyone from the fire he hung around at night—Just down there, they said, pointing at a field on Kotzee Road—was saying he’d gone, he’d passed, just in the night like that.

  Then both of them crossed themselves and I just stood there, feeling my legs start to shake. “Do you … What was his name?” I asked

  And I’ve played this part back a million times to myself. I loop it and loop it and I try suss it out, but it’s so hard to tell—

  They talked quickly to each other in slang Afrikaans that I couldn’t follow at all, and they looked at me and both of them had a kind of new face on. It was like, at all costs, they didn’t want to tell me something I didn’t want to hear, and so they both just beamed these ingratiating smiles at me.

  “Hey?” I said.

  “We not sure,” the guy told me.

  “Was it …” I said—then the part where I stared off, and wondered for a bit if I actually wanted to know.

  “Was it Ray?”

  “How’d you know him?” the woman asked me. “Did he dwelm?”

  “Was it Ray?” I said again, loudly.

  The guy with the crutch said, “Easy, boet. Easy. Go ask down there.”

  And I couldn’t talk, for the longest time. I couldn’t cry. I don’t even think I was blinking.

  Eventually the guy swung himself round on his crutches and went back to work at the robot, but the woman stayed, scratching herself. I remember her eyes were looking away from me and a little bit down. I remember feeling like I could’ve said anything to her, but finally I just asked, “Where’s cheap to stay? Around here.”

  “Like a night shelter?”

  “More like the opposite,” I said—

  And then, probably because Phil was still in my mind, I remembered about Ken—Ken and the fucking Rainbow Lodge.

  I asked her if she knew it

  And, on that golden afternoon, I cried and she walked with me, her bony, jointed arm in mine, it was like I was getting married to a praying mantis.

  All the way through Salt River and right up to the door of The Rainbow Lodge.

  One domino falling.

  Crashing into another.

  Crashing into another.

  The Rainbow Lodge used to be a warehouse off Salt River Road. A massive concrete floor space with resounding walls and high windows, a mezzanine in one corner, no showers, just a couple of cramped toilets and a tiny kitchen area with jack shit in the way of appliances or crockery or anything. Most of the floor space had been partitioned up with chipboard that stood about six feet from the ground. The partitions made rooms with doors you could lock with a bicycle chain—thirty-two rooms all roughly the same size, basic as anything, most of them permanently taken.

  It had a sign outside and a reception desk and everything, but it was all a kind of front. There were some rooms that were rented by the hour, and people—maybe eighty per cent of them were full-time junkies, but the rest were rich schoolkids, businessmen, housewives, off-duty cops and ambulance drivers—would come in to hide away from the world for a few hours and just sin to their hearts’ content.

  Everyone who actually lived at The Rainbow Lodge, though, worked for Ken in some way or another. There were thugs and robbers and a doctor and drivers, and there were ten guys living there who sold tik, Sparks and his friends, and they were the ones that really made you wonder. They’d go out on the road for days—jumped up, plugged in, superhuman—and only every now and then you’d see them stalking around The Rainbow Lodge, their faces like gloomy masks either grinning or irate, backlit by a brain that couldn’t put out more than forty watts anymore and carrying a smell on them of singed wires and sour smoke.

  It was a thoroughly illegal sort of place, but it wasn’t lawless. There were pieces of paper up on all the walls, A4 printouts of a list called KEN’S RULES, and if you broke any of them, you were out

  And if you really fucked up—if you tried your luck in any way—you’d make it onto The Noticeboard, this corkboard pinned full of grainy CCTV shots of people that Ken wanted to take revenge on.

  Ken.

  This small, slender, stylish guy—wide, fine features, no bones ever broken in that face, warm eyes, no scars on his skin—quite beautiful, in the same way cats are

  And compelling as the devil

  And who knows, I probably would’ve fallen into line as a dealer or something if I’d had to—I guess I was just lucky he recognised me from before.

  Well, not at first, but then I reminded him of this thing he’d done back then.

  I’ve always remembered it so clearly.

  It was after Phil and I met him the first time to discuss everything. We were on our way out and he told us to hang on and he brought out an instant camera. He made me and Phil pose together and he took a photo and waited for it to develop, and then he came over to us and said, “Now I got you. Hey? You try fuck me, I got you,” and he went and put the photo in a metal cash box and locked it away in his desk.

  “I promise,” I said. “You took a photo of me and my friend, you can check.”

  “Ah, my pictures,” Ken said. He seemed happy to think about them. “Now I have cameras.”

  He called some dude in and spoke to him for a bit in a language that sounded like birds singing.

  Then he smiled at me, in his leather pants and his cowboy boots and his dashiki shirt, and he just said again, “My pictures.”

  The guy came back with the box and Ken took his time looking through the photos. Eventually he said, “Oh, hello. This is you?”

  And there I was, standing with Phil, trying to smile but looking weird—almost like I was sick with something.

  “Now we’ll see,” Ken said, and he stared at me while he turned the photo over.

  On the back, he’d written the date and some other numbers and symbols that must’ve meant something to him—but under all that, he’d written GOOD GUYZ!!

  And that was all it took. He asked me how long I wanted to stay and I told him I didn’t know. “Okay,” he said. “Free for now. But you buy all your shit heah,” he said, and he poked me in the chest when he said that. “And you pay full prices.”

  “Jeez,” I said. “Sounds like the best hotel in the world.”

  He even walked me to the room I was going to be staying in, gave me a bit of a tour of the place. His favourite part was when we went behind a big steel door, past a dude sitting out front with a gun right there in his hand, into this dark room, filled with suitcases. “My bags of tricks,” Ken said. I asked him why some of them had blue ribbons tied around
the handles and he told me those were for the police. Once a week, Ken basically bought indemnity. One suitcase went to the Woodstock station, one went downtown. He gave me a long, slow smile and he said, “You can relax, brother. Here, you can relax.”

  And if I wasn’t so sure at the time, I think two nights after that I saw Ken sitting in a cop van in an empty parking lot at the Caltex on Main Road—I clearly, clearly saw him and the cop, this white dude with a moustache—and both of them were leaning in over a glowing cellphone and bumping lines with a piece of straw they passed back and forth. No, Ken was definitely in with the cops.

  It made me so proud of him.

  The second week I was there, inspired by the amount of fucking I heard going on every night around me in the dark, I ended up bringing a girl back to my room—she had a huge, coarse caesarean scar on her belly but she had pretty lips, and I’m sure we were going to end up having sex but then some guys banged on my door, then forced it open and turned on the lights and chucked her out. One of the guys kakked on me in broken English, then he marched over and—of all fucking things—he forced a Flip File into my hands. “Here you choose,” he said. Inside the Flip File, stuck onto lined pieces of paper, were pictures of women. The worst part was they weren’t even like sexy pictures or anything—they just looked like photos they’d all brought in from home

  And thank god Ken stormed in before I had to tell the guy I wasn’t into it. Ken was wearing a polo neck and a beret that night, both of them lilac—but fuck he was scary, and he wasn’t even shouting at me. He was jabbing his finger at the dude who’d given me the Flip File and it wasn’t all in English, but he ended up by shouting, “This guy, this guy does what he likes, nè?”

  And after that, really, I just did my thing with impunity around The Rainbow Lodge.

  Everyone left me alone.

  They stepped aside, and I was on my own

  The whole way down.

  It was just about four months, but still, it was quite a falling-off.

  I got into a range of stuff. I found some favourite things and I did them again and again and again—bleary, beautiful night walks on ketamine, down Salt River Road past the factories and the date palms and playing with cats outside houses lit with lonely yellow lights and sometimes going to a payphone and dialling home and crying when I heard that screechy disconnected sound, smoking cocaine in a hot shower at the YMCA, staying in and reading or writing on any kind of upper or going to town just to be in the lights and look at the women …