Like it Matters

by David Cornwell

  I laughed and kissed her. “You know what I’ve always wanted to do? Like full-time, I mean. But I’m sure it’s not a good idea.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve always wanted to bet horses.”

  “Bet them what?” she said.

  I laughed, then went and poured myself another drink to try catch up.

  I told her what I knew about horses. Just the stuff I could remember hearing from my dad—his insights, that’s what he called them—plus a couple of improvements I picked up myself, mainly from listening to what the other guys up at the tote used to tease him about. I told her about form books and how some horses you had to watch, because they were like performers, and they’d only really turn it on if it was a big race and there was a crowd there and a lot of fuss. I even told her how much I used to like going to the tote because that was the only time I ever saw my dad really talk to black people, and even better, how I wasn’t allowed to mention horses unless it was just the two of us together, like it was a secret he wanted to keep even from petrol attendants and strangers at the movies.

  Talking and talking, till she squeezed my hand and said, “Ed, hang on.”

  She was looking at me and there was something in her face.

  It looked like she had news.

  Jesus.

  From where?

  “Okay, you know the guy from the bank that keeps calling me?”

  For about a week, maybe longer, her phone had been ringing at least a couple of times a day. “That fucker, still?”

  “Ja. Um … Okay. I lied about that.”

  I must’ve looked panicked—

  She took my hand and she said, “Just … okay, just let me explain. It’s my cousin, Ed.”

  “Your cousin?”

  “Ja, his name’s Dewald.”

  “Dewald? Okay. Why didn’t you just say so?”

  She smiled, but in a sad way. She bit her lip. “Ed, you probably think I’m the black sheep, hey? God. Dewald. He’s been into some dark stuff since he was young, Ed, and then he comes right for a while, and then he’s off again, properly fucking off.”

  “What’s he like now?”

  “I think he’s alright. But he’s been up in Pretoria and now he wants to move back this side.”

  “So he wants to come here?”

  “Ja.”

  “That’s cool, but I mean then we’ll definitely have to get a job or whatever. Or this horses thing—”

  “No, you see! This is the thing, this is the thing.” She was rubbing my hands with her hands. She looked so happy. “He was up in Pretoria for technikon, then he got a job there working with machines, I think, but he got retrenched, Ed. That’s the thing. Like last month, he got retrenched.”

  “So, what, he’s got a lot of money right now?”

  “Fucking lots. Lots and lots.”

  “So when’s he coming?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She kissed me.

  “Soon?”

  “Probably soon.”

  And how was I supposed to know what was coming next?

  As far as I could tell, we’d just got a lifeline—no having to pull things straight just yet, no jobs, nothing to worry about

  “Rock ’n’ roll,” I said, and I kissed her again.

  It was sweet how Charlotte got the house ready for Dewald, even if most of the time she was quiet, really quiet, and her face had this sore look on it that just wouldn’t go away.

  It took her two days, and god, she worked slowly. She wanted to do it all by herself, but what didn’t help was that she was drinking while she went along, and so whenever she was done with something she had to clean up after herself again. It was like another version of a Greek punishment and eventually I started following her with my own bucket and sponge. On the day he was meant to arrive we promised we wouldn’t drink and she made supper, and she got me to cut about a ton of ivy off the walls outside. Everything was done by six, and we stood for a while in the lounge with the last light of day pressing in through the windows, and she’d found a warm yellow bulb for the lamp and the couch was made up like a bed again.

  Even though it actually looked something like a home, we weren’t fooled—we knew how rickety it was—and for the longest time we just stood in the lounge and held each other, and I know I was dying for a drink.

  Dewald was late, though, really late, and he wasn’t answering his phone and obviously that made us worry, and so we started drinking when the sun went down and we didn’t feel too dingy about it. Then, just before midnight, Charlotte’s phone rang and we found out Dewald had just made it through a roadblock the other side of the tunnel coming in from Paarl. She told me that, and then she said, “Wow, Ed, he’s coming.”

  Her voice wasn’t right, though.

  And her face—

  “What’s going on?” I said. “Are you okay?”

  And it was like what happens with little girls—her chin scrunched up and then it shook and then her eyes sprang tears, and I hugged her while she cried into my T-shirt and she kept saying, “I’m scared, Ed, I’m so scared.”

  “Why, Charlotte? What’s up? What’s happening?”

  “Are we going to be good with The Rule?”

  “Ja, of course. Of course we will,” I said, but it was fucked, it was like the act of saying the words immediately made me doubt them, and I started catching her anxiety in a big way.

  She didn’t cry for long, and while she went off to go wash her face I poured myself another drink and I asked myself if there really was a difference anymore, whether or not we took anything else while Dewald was around.

  I knew there was.

  But I also knew that if you had a mean heart you might say, Bad enough is bad enough, and it didn’t matter much either way.

  It was amazingly soon after the phone call that we heard Dewald’s car coming down the road. This rumbling, roaring thing—it sounded like an entire motorbike gang was arriving.

  We went out to the gate to meet him just as he turned the corner—his car, either the brakes or something in the steering column, moaning like a whale before he came to a stop right in front of us. When he turned off the ignition the engine shook and whinnied and snorted like a mad horse.

  Dewald drove a nineties Monza, except it didn’t much look like a car anymore. It was a dark, dark purple colour, and it had acid green stripes painted down the middle. Racing stripes, and a big, gothic D on the bonnet. The suspension was sunk so low you could hardly put your fist under the body and the mags were spiked and on the back it had a spoiler that fanned out like a pair of batwings.

  I’d been drinking for hours at that point and it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen, and I looked over at Charlotte and she was beaming

  But then the door opened

  And I got a glimpse

  Jesus—not again

  That wasn’t Dewald, that was TJ

  That was definitely TJ!

  The bottom fell right out of my stomach

  And I had to turn away or else I was going to fall over, and I heard Charlotte saying hello to him and then I heard her calling, “Ed! Ed, come say hi! What’s wrong?”

  And I listened, I listened so hard for that high, kind of lisping voice I’ll never forget, and then I thought I heard it.

  Maybe not as high, actually.

  Slowly, slowly I turned round—and there he was, standing right next to Charlotte, side by side.

  Instinctively, I put my hand up to my face—maybe I was trying to hide myself, I’m not sure—but my hand scraped on my beard and I thought, Fuck, at least there’s that.

  Was he shorter than TJ?

  And he looks the same age as he did back then—so that’s impossible, right?

  I stuck out my hand and he shook it really hard and he said, “Beslis.” Then he hugged me.

  I said, “Let me help with your bags.”

  He said, “Kiff. Dis net daai manne,” and he pointed to two gym bags on the back se
at.

  “Is that it, Dewald?” Charlotte said.

  “More or less, hey. Except the important stuff,” he said, then smiled and took a screwdriver out his pocket. I put the bags on my shoulders and watched him stick the screwdriver in under the steering wheel, near the hooter, and it made a popping sound and then he unclipped the front and sank his arm down into the steering wheel. It was fucking awesome and he knew we were staring. I heard him say, “This is the best thing about this car, I tell you”

  And then I took off to the house.

  I dropped his bags by the couch in the lounge and then I went to the bathroom and locked the door. I lay down for a while on the cold floor, telling myself I was crazy, that wasn’t TJ, that was Charlotte’s cousin. Just like that wasn’t my dad back at the traffic lights that day, it was some poor homeless guy and they are legion. Telling myself again and again, It’s demons you’re battling, Ed, not ghosts.

  It didn’t help, and I went and stood in front of the mirror and tried so hard to remember what I looked like when I was eighteen.

  Short hair.

  No beard. Some shit sideburns, maybe.

  Probably weighed more back then

  And I knew I couldn’t hide in the bathroom all night but I also told myself I wasn’t allowed to drink anymore, either—I needed to be sharp in case it all went to shit—and I splashed some water on my face and I was about to go out into the lounge

  But then there was a knock on the bathroom door.

  For about five seconds, I honestly had this vision of TJ bursting in and breaking my skull against some tiles in the shower, but then I heard Charlotte, in this tiny voice, saying, “Ed? Ed?”

  And when I opened the door, she was standing there with this look on her face—I’d seen that look just once before in my life, on my dad. When I was fourteen he caught me smoking in the shed and he tried to punish me by making me chain-smoke the whole box in front of him—except it didn’t work, I did it easily; if anything, he got drunk while he was watching me

  And I remember that look—

  This I know I’m a fuck-up but I need you to love me for it kind of look—

  And there it was again, on Charlotte’s face.

  I held her close and I could just make out what she was saying.

  “Dewald wants to go to town, Ed. What are we going to do?”

  I was still too shocked by the sight of TJ to say much

  But after we went out to the lounge and he was being so friendly to me—

  He really didn’t seem to get who I was—

  And after he showed us his Magic Box, this poker set, with the foam columns all filled with little bags of different stuff, various powders and pills

  And after he’d made his Concoction and put it in a big glass pipe that looked like a sex toy, and after Charlotte gave in so easily and smoked some

  I also broke The Rule.

  Shattered the fucking thing.

  DEWALD’S CAR HAD A STEEL DASHBOARD and red velvet seats, and it smelled like a combination of hash and that fucking Golden Products carpet cleaner I used to have to hawk with my dad.

  I was in the back seat and when he turned the car on I could feel the chassis shaking, and from the front there was this progressively demented sound while the engine warmed up.

  We went slowly through Muizenberg and the edge of Lakeside, shuddering when we stopped at robots, but jeez, as soon as we turned onto the M3 and got some open road to play with, Dewald fucking gunned the thing

  And the car felt good going fast—it felt great, it felt on the verge of lifting off and I didn’t care if it did, I dared it to. Charlotte had her head out the window and she was shouting at the other cars when we flew past them. Dewald put the music on and the system he had rigged up in there was so loud it made my ribs buzz.

  I still couldn’t tell if getting high had been a good idea or not—I’d kind of go through waves. I’d stare at Dewald, and I’d see a completely new person behind the wheel and I’d be feeling wonderful

  But then he’d scratch his nose or light a cigarette or something and I’d remember TJ so clearly it was sickening. At one point, he reached back over his shoulder and handed me a capsule, and the way he winked when I took it, I swear, there were voices in my head shouting, He knows! He knows!

  And I had to lie down on the back seat and try pull myself together.

  I could hardly breathe, thinking, He’s haunting you, Ed.

  He’s always been haunting you.

  This thing with TJ happened when I was eighteen and I was still living in Grahamstown. I’d finished school but I was doing nothing with myself—really, nothing. My dad had stopped bothering with solid food by that point and I was the only person in the whole world who knew how fucked he was. I didn’t tell my friends about it, even when I started seeing them less and less and they kept asking me why. My dad had also lost all his friends by then—the one stalwart, Willie, still used to come round sometimes, but his jam was to siphon petrol out my dad’s tank and then sit in the lounge all afternoon huffing it from a paint tin.

  I’d really wanted to go to varsity. The money my mom had left me in the trust—I got it when I turned eighteen—would’ve covered the fees but then it would’ve been wiped out, and I guess I was scared of seeing it all go so fast. I knew I should’ve at least made a hobby out of sorting my dad out, but I couldn’t, not back then I couldn’t. Right before all this happened with TJ, honest to god, the plan really was to pull myself together and get a job, then pack my dad off somewhere decent and go to varsity the next year. I was always meant to actually do something with myself, I promise. This was just the first time I got derailed …

  My thoughts spun off like that—I was thinking about my dad some more

  But then I felt the car brake sharply, and I sat up.

  I could see lots of flashing lights outside the windows.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “Relax,” said Dewald. “Red lights. Bad news vir iemand, maar nie vir ons nie.”

  When we got to town whatever was in that capsule had put a flying feeling in me

  And Charlotte had her face up against her window, her hands also on the glass—she was somewhere else entirely

  And it must’ve been payday or something because the city was seething. While we were stopped at a robot the music went softer, and then we inched our way down one of the side roads towards Long Street, bar lights shining into the car, so many people out on the street, all of them dressed up and lurid like figures out of oil paintings. We made the turn and more faces swung past the window, Charlotte laughed, and then Dewald double-parked the car and put the emergencies on. I opened my door and I spilled out into the street, a car went by, I could feel the heat off its bonnet, I closed my door and opened the passenger side and I helped Charlotte out into the middle of all that bright noise …

  Mostly they spoke together in Afrikaans, and I could follow them, sort of, but I didn’t really want to talk in case they teased my accent, and so I went out onto the balcony and smoked a joint with a Portuguese guy who told me the reason that town was so nuts was because it’d just been announced we were getting the World Cup in 2010. I didn’t ask which sport.

  I’d only had a couple of drinks before my stomach started roiling, and the joint made me introspective and so back at the table I was just having glass after glass of water and I was feeling quite good about myself. Charlotte had bleary eyes and a bit of a vague, sexy stare fixed in them—she was cocktail drunk, but she was handling it okay. Not like Dewald, who’d ploughed through like twelve beers and about as many shots—he was hanging on by a thread. They disappeared together a few times to go bump something, just going behind the gambling machines at the back of the place. They told me it was cat and it must’ve been strong, they’d come back to the table and they’d be twitching and quiet, then loud and erratic when they started to talk.

  I wasn’t even tempted. It hardly ever happens, but I was feeling fine just the way I w
as. I was staring at Dewald mostly, and I was stuck into thinking about that Festival when it all went wrong.

  I remember I was trying to run into some drugs at the time, but the problem was my friend for this kind of stuff, Phil, he’d already fucked off to Cape Town, and I didn’t know who else to speak to. How I solved it, finally, was I found some schoolkids smoking dope in a side street near the Village Green, and I threatened to call their headmaster if they didn’t tell me where they’d bought it. They told me a crazy story about this guy who wore a bright-blue pirate’s jacket around on the Green, calling himself Captain TJ, and his partner, this hot redhead who used to be a contortionist or something, but she did fire poi now. They told me that when they’d bought from them, they’d been in a big, lumo tent down at the campsite on the Albany fields.

  It sounded like bullshit, but then I saw her in African Street, the redhead the kids were talking about, it couldn’t’ve been anyone else but her

  And I followed her all the way to the Albany fields, too shy to catch up and say anything.

  We walked through the family area—mostly Afrikaners, with jacked tents and skottelbraais—and then when we were getting near the edge of the site I heard this deep throbbing electronic music playing out of a bakkie, and I knew that’s where she was headed. I saw the lumo tent the kids’d told me about.

  I hung back and I watched her soak her poi in little buckets of paraffin and then light them and start dancing over by the bakkie—this strange style, elegant but sort of grungy and primitive at the same time. At some point she saw me, so then I had to say something because otherwise it’d be weird

  But I’d hardly started talking to her before, from the tent, I heard this thin voice shouting, “Fuck, shut up!”

  And then TJ stuck his head out the flap and said, “Shut up, man. Jissus.”

  I was a bit stunned that he could even hear me over the music, but I asked him, “Listen, TJ, could you maybe help me out with something?”

  And he shook his head at me and rubbed his hands over his face. “So I must just forget sleep? Hey? Fok. Come in the tent here.”

  I ducked inside and it was terrible in there—the air was thick and it smelled like sweat and hangover. “Thanks so much, man,” I said. “Sorry if I woke you up.”