by MP Miles
“I’m telling them I’m going to be a movie star.”
Ralph hadn’t yet seen Africa, a nagging concern to him. He had a non-transferable flight home in just under three months’ time and until then felt trapped by poverty in The Diplomat. His fortune changed with an advertisement on a noticeboard at the YMCA asking for people to appear in a commercial. At an audition the director had asked him to describe a situation where he could do something that he’d always dreamed of doing. He then had to build it up, finally exclaiming the words ‘I did it’.
For Ralph it had been easy to talk about learning to fly. Alone in a dark room he had talked up his story, shouting out, “I did it!” The agent had seemed delighted. Ralph hadn’t realised that along with looking for actors they had been looking for inspiration. The client, a national savings bank, claimed the subsequent shoot as entirely down to him.
The agent promised him US dollars in cash, just ten per cent of what she would charge the production company but both knew Ralph hoped to work illegally. He had little room to negotiate and he didn’t care.
“Oh right. A movie star.”
“Tomorrow. Filming at Kyalami. Want to watch?”
She’s sad, he thought. Lonely, like me.
“Do you earn a lot being a movie star?”
“Yep, four hundred dollars. In notes.”
“Do you know me?” she said.
It wouldn’t be the first time that someone had been nice to her just to get their hands on her money, after their hands had been everywhere else. Then she hesitated, thinking of what tomorrow had in store for her. A day mostly in bed, frightened to move for fear of hitting something, until the need to drink compelled her.
“I’ll come if you bring rum. But I won’t watch.”
Ralph laughed.
“Okay. Where shall I meet you?”
“You’ll have to come to me. Take a cab. Fifty Hyde Park, Sandton. We’ll take my car from there. But you’ll have to drive. You can drive, Ralph with an R?”
“Sleep well. It’s an early start.” Ralph shouted after her, “But what’s your name?”
She didn’t reply and the cab door shut with a slam.
Five
Ralph drove nervously to the motor racing circuit near Midrand, shuffling tomato juice coloured vodka and cigarettes for Elanza. They arrived late but filming at Kyalami had been delayed. The star of the show, an aeroplane, had gone tech, as had a lot of the production crew. They sat close together on the grass, Elanza holding his arm and asking questions about the set that he wasn’t qualified to answer, until he left her to go to work.
“How did it go?” she asked him.
“Befok.”
Elanza laughed, the sun warm on her back.
“Befok?”
“Yes. It’s Afrikaans.”
“I know what it is, bokkie. Have you said your line?”
“Said it. Don’t know if they’ll use it. They’ve got some pros here. That guy over there. The one with perfect hair that looks like he lives in a home furnishings commercial.”
Elanza looked up through dark glasses but in the wrong direction.
“And him too,” said Ralph, following her stare. “Toothpaste. He’s used for teeth apparently. Bent as a nine-bob note. They call him the tooth fairy.”
She laughed.
“I’ve got to do it in Afrikaans now. Ek het dit.”
“Well, they definitely won’t use that, you domkop.”
“Domkop?”
“Yeah, it’s Afrikaans.”
Elanza, surprised at how much she enjoyed his company, thought she should get out more during the day.
She touched his arm. “You want a drink or something after this?”
“I want to eat.”
“Eat?”
“Steak.”
He repeated his new word as a runner called him to stand pointing at the sky and: “For God’s sake, don’t look at the camera this time.”
“Domkop.”
*
Ralph fed Elanza from his plate, like a child, small squares cut from a slab of meat crowned with an asparagus tip. She wanted more wine but when she lifted her glass she seemed unable to find her mouth and a bead would escape and run down her chin.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I stayed with a relation near Cape Town and then I thought I should see a bit of the country before I went home.”
Ralph held more meat on a fork in front of her. She opened her mouth obediently and let it melt on her tongue.
“When did you leave Cape Town?”
“05.54. Train number 3205 from Platform Ten. Got me to the beach at Strand about an hour and a half later.”
“At 05.54. That’s very funny.”
“And then I walked to East London.”
Elanza swallowed and choked.
“You walked from Cape Town to East London?”
“Yep. I tried to keep as close to the coast as I could.”
“How far is that?”
Ralph thought as he ate.
“It’s hard to say exactly. I mean, I know what it is by road but a lot of it turned out to be beach walking. I think I walked just over 1,100 kilometres.”
“How long did that take?”
“Thirty-five days.”
“You walked for over a month?”
Ralph pushed the plate away. Elanza had eaten well but the steak had been huge and it had beaten him.
“Walking is really interesting. You think it’s just putting one foot in front of the other. Walking is a science. People have got doctorates and spent their careers studying it. There’s something called the preferred walking speed.”
“And what is that?”
“A Scottish mountaineer calculated it as five kilometres per hour plus an hour for every six hundred metres of ascent. Naismith’s Rule.”
“No, domkop, I mean what is it?”
“Oh, well it’s the speed that humans choose to walk if there are no other outside influences. People with poor vision walk slower.”
Elanza looked at the floor.
“Really?”
“Yes. You need to be able to see to know what speed to walk at.”
Without realising it people put a value on their time and therefore have a need to get where they are going as quickly as possible. They want to do that efficiently, using the minimum of muscle force and the least stress on their joints. To achieve that goal people look around as they walk and subconsciously monitor the rate that things go past, regulating their pace by speeding up or slowing down. Ralph wanted to explain it to her but something made him stop.
“Five kilometres per hour?” she asked.
“Yep, five kilometres per hour.”
“You have a very practical way of looking at things,” she said.
“Is there a better way?”
Elanza didn’t know. She usually tried not to think about anything. Life improved when she spent it asleep.
“So, how far did you walk in a day?”
“I averaged just over thirty kilometres.”
He would walk from six in the morning for four hours as hard as he could and then take a short break. Before lunch he would continue at a more leisurely pace for two hours and then rest most of the afternoon. Around four he would start again, just ambling along, and look for a place to spend the night well before six.
“I did about seven or eight hours a day but only at four kilometres per hour.”
Elanza laughed.
“Only four?”
“Naismith didn’t allow for temperature and walking on sand.”
She smiled. He looked very young, so serious and matter-of-fact.
“What route did you take?” she asked encouragingly.
“I took the co
mmuter train for about fifty kilometres from Cape Town Central, just to get out of town, and then from Strand I walked down the beach.”
The town of Strand continued urban and developed as far as Gordon’s Bay. From there the road hugged the coast in between the sea at False Bay and a ridge of hills, and it became quieter. There had been a beautiful beach at Kogel Bay with mountains behind, and all the way along the coast to Rooi-Els whales swam close inshore.
“I took loads of pictures.”
A track led to a beach at Pringle Bay and then to the lighthouse on the point at Cape Hangklip and onward to Betty’s Bay until it merged with the road to Kleinmond. He remembered a long beach past a lagoon to Hawston and then the road again to Hermanus before he rejoined the beach to Gansbaai. He crossed the Uilenkraal River mouth and ran down a pearly beach layered in shells.
“I found a magnificent shell. I’ve no idea what lived in it.”
Ralph pulled a napkin towards him and looked for a pen.
“I’ll draw it.”
“Just tell me about it.”
“Circular, about the size of a big dinner plate, with a wide opening, and it spiralled into the middle.”
“Probably a nautilus.”
“Hmm. A nautilus.”
He followed the coast then as closely as he could down sand and rocky paths to the Quoin Point Peninsula, with waves crashing on the Cape of Good Hope and the surf booming all the way to Die Dam. From there the beach and coastal path continued to Suiderstrand, with shipwrecks washed ashore at L’Agulhas, then on to Struisbaai and more beach to Arniston. Still on the beach he went through some sort of military range with lots of construction work on the other side of the dunes.
“There were some really unusual structures at this place on the beach – Overberg. I wish I hadn’t lost my camera.”
“Don’t worry.”
“I think someone stole it and the camera bag from my room at the YMCA after I’d gone to work. It had all my film rolls in it as well. I thought about selling it. Some American guy said he’d give me a 150 dollars US. Olympus: a great camera. Dad gave it to me for my eighteenth.”
Elanza tried to drink more wine.
“Shame. Where then?”
“Then I took a shore path to Cape Infanta and then the Breede River, where I nearly got eaten by a shark.”
She spluttered Merlot.
“A shark!” she exclaimed.
Ralph nodded. From there it became wild past Jongensfontein and Still Bay.
“I went in some caves at Blombos. They’d found the earliest evidence of fishing there. Apparently a hundred and forty thousand years ago man fished.”
After Mossel Bay it became harder to follow the coast, especially from Glentana to Wilderness and then again beyond Knysna, as more farmed and private land ran right down to the sea. From St Francis Bay he could follow the coast again to Port Elizabeth and then more beach all the way through Port Alfred to East London. He’d had enough by then, not of walking but of loneliness.
“I got a ride with two hippies. We stopped off and climbed some mountains in the Drakensberg. I can’t remember much about it. We were all high on hash cakes.”
“Where did you sleep?”
“On the beach mostly. One night before Plettenberg Bay I slept in a forest under a giant California redwood tree.”
She moved closer to him, their thighs touching, and pointed in the direction of the wine bottle. Ralph filled her glass.
“Tell me about the shark.”
He had walked over some heathland at Cape Infanta and could see an estuary at the mouth of the Breede River, with the town of Witsand on the other side and the beach beyond leading east. He sat and studied the river for a long time. It looked wide and fast flowing, although when the wind blew out to sea and the tide was coming in, small choppy waves bounced about but wooden branches on the surface didn’t seem to be moving. The wind and current had cancelled each other out. He walked a little way upstream to where the river narrowed at a boat park. He found an old wooden pallet lying about and dragged it to the water’s edge.
“I planned to swim across the Breede River, pushing my rucksack on a pallet in front of me.”
Just as he entered the water two men sweeping a yard had run towards him shouting, waving tired brooms.
“It turns out there is some sort of shark that can live in fresh water called a bull shark.”
“A Zambezi shark?”
“Yeah. That’s right. Bull shark or Zambezi shark. A huge one had been caught at that very spot about two days previously – massive thing about four metres long.”
The men had probably saved his life.
“How did you cross the river?”
“I had to walk up to a village called Malgas.”
He found the closest place he could cross, about thirty kilometres upriver.
“It took me all day to get there. They had a strange floating bridge and you pulled yourself across.”
He then walked thirty kilometres down the other side to get back to where he’d started but on the opposite bank. It had been a two-day, sixty-kilometre walk instead of a ten-minute, two hundred and fifty metre swim.
“I should have swum across. It would have been worth the risk.”
She didn’t know the Cape. Her life had been spent on the farm and then lost in town, just about as far from the sea as you could possibly get in South Africa. She would have liked to have walked a beach, to search for shells with Ralph.
“You are crazy.”
“Not crazy, just stupid. I must have someone looking over me. An angel or something.”
*
Elanza lay across a chair, her head on Ralph’s shoulder. A day in the sun, the fresh air, the food, had tired her. She’d drunk very little.
“What made you think of the learning to fly trick anyway? For the TV commercial I mean.”
“It’s something I grew up wanting to do. I guess because of my dad.”
Elanza listened to him.
“Dad loved aeroplanes.”
Ralph put his arm around her shoulder. He thought of his father and those times while growing up when, without meaning to, he had been selfish and rude, arrogant and ungrateful.
“I think that if I learnt to fly, if I could take him flying just once, in some small way I could pay him back.”
She thought of her own father and the emptiness since his death. She didn’t have a sufficient level of clarity to realise that she had been filling the emptiness with something, anything, drugs, sex with men she didn’t know, stronger drugs.
She felt the tears well up inside as she pulled him to her and hung on him, feeling him, hoping that with him she would be strong enough to face another night of sadness in the dark.
“So, is there a girlfriend at home?” she asked breezily.
“Oh yes. She’s still at school. Getting the grades to go and study medicine.”
“She’s clever, then.”
“Very. In all sorts of ways. Good at science but reads poetry. Plays the cello. Great gymnast.”
“Been seeing her a while?”
“Since the summer, our summer back home. Last summer.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Lovely. Do you want to see her picture?”
“No.”
She kissed him. He felt tense all over, as if someone might punch him.
“Do you love her?”
Ralph thought for a moment.
“It’s not easy. I have competition: Jupiter.”
“Unusual name.”
“Not for a retriever.”
Elanza laughed and looked at him.
“Have you made love to her?”
“No. Of course not.”
She stroked his leg through his jeans. Like a puppy, she thought, out of the ro
und cuddly stage but unsure how to control his limbs.
“Have you made love to anyone?”
He looked away.
“Okay. This will be interesting,” she said.
She reached inside a drawer on a little round table.
“Here. Use this. I’ll show you.”
*
Elanza met Snyman at his office in Sandton the following day, just as he’d returned from lunch. Although sober she had been sick in the night, quietly without waking Ralph. Now she felt weak.
Nels sat there too, calmly picking his teeth.
“What’s he doing here?” she asked Snyman.
He didn’t answer and Nels smiled a dirty grin.
“Elanza, I want to reassure you that you’ll have the best treatment.”
Snyman surprised Elanza. He seemed genuinely concerned for her.
“Since your father died, the trust has been prudently managed. There are no money worries. Whatever you need—”
She didn’t let him finish.
“I need to make a will.”
Awake in the night, hearing the boy sleep beside her, the reality of what the doctor had told her would happen to her had suddenly made her scared. Elanza had worried about it all night. She lived alone, had no living relatives.
“I don’t think we need worry about that, Elanza.”
She ignored him.
“We’ll need a witness,” she nodded towards Nels.
“Really, Elanza.”
“I’m not a bakvissie. I want the sole beneficiary to be Mr Ralph Phillips of Gillingham, Dorset, England. That’s Ralph with an R. Two copies. Draw it up. Excuse me.”
She took herself to the bathroom, feeling more nausea.
Lizette had typed up a document before she returned, sweating and weak.
“Stamp,” she said to Lizette.
Elanza took a cab and asked it to stop at a post office. The driver put the envelope addressed to her doctor in the box. She couldn’t think of anyone else, she had no one else, no family and no one she could trust. She definitely didn’t trust Koos Snyman.
*
Nels started looking at Tramps, in the basement of The Diplomat. Snyman wanted him to find out about Ralph Phillips so Nels looked where he knew Elanza had been. As he entered from the street bleary customers stared at him and the bar went quiet but, disappointingly, he hadn’t needed to beat the barman. In the upstairs restaurant the staff had been nervous but loyal, the waitress contemptuous and angry with the manager for talking to him. He called Snyman after walking to the YMCA.
