Slipping

by Lauren Beukes

  “Oh, like you’ve never miscalculated! Look, do you want to hear this or not?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So I thought the bench was closer than it was and I kinda fell back and I was laughing and I hit my neck on the strut on the back. Right here?”

  She touches the tender little hollow among the wisps of hair where the vertebrae of the spine connect with the skull, the keystone holding the human body together.

  “And that was it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, he didn’t show up. I was expecting him to, you know? But no one did.”

  It takes time.

  Nolly cries a lot and demands more painkillers. We play cards. She cheats. I let her. The brace they’ve locked her in looks like scaffolding, but like scaffolding it’s temporary. It’ll come off, eventually.

  Her family upgrades her to a private hospital, a private room. It’s always full of flowers, so I bring her other things to take her mind off the pain: books and homemade chocolates from the German deli in town. At the ghost girl’s insistence, I pick up quirky stuff that might amuse her at the flea market, like a menagerie of porcelain circus animals.

  Her family and friends buzz around her bedside. Her brother gives me looks like it’s all my fault. Maybe it is.

  “I thought he was dead,” I say, still shocked. It seems impossible that he would be here, in person at the National Gallery.

  “You think a lot of crazy things,” the ghost girl says, dancing ahead of me, hyped up like a puppy on the beach barking at the waves. “He’s only eighty-four. C’mon.”

  A woman at the entrance presses a badge into my hand as the crowd seeps into the gallery. It reads “Pancho Guedes—Retrospective” in seventies-orange. It’s a belated official opening because Pancho was away, getting an award at a Biennale or something.

  I guess I would have known about all this, his being alive, the opening, if I’d been paying attention, going to class, all the normal stuff. But I’ve been visiting Nolly every day.

  It’s the word “retrospective” that threw me, made me think he was deceased.

  The gallery is packed, the crowd expanding outwards to fill all available space, so the latecomers, including us, have to be corralled into the nineteenth-century portrait room. We can’t see anything past the bodies standing straight and tall, stirring gently like a field of mealies as the speakers go on about Pancho’s Habitable Woman and hysterical buildings and the architect as witch doctor.

  Afterwards, the crowd flushes through the main gallery and out into the courtyard, aiming single-mindedly for the cocktail snacks.

  “You have to eat sushi for me,” the girl says, mournful. “I never got to. It always looked too disgusting.”

  “It still does,” I object.

  Maneuvering past the buffet table scrum, looking for an opening, I realize that HE’s standing right behind me, talking to the museum curator and a journalist taking notes.

  The girl figures it out at the same time. “Isn’t that the guy?”

  And then the little cow trips me, deliberately, so I practically fling myself into the bony arms of the museum curator.

  “Watch the steps,” Pancho says, mildly, turning to me, a glass of water in his hand. “They’re badly designed.”

  “Mr. Guedes.” I pronounce it with the Portuguese slur on the “des,” but that’s the only thing I get right.

  Later I will spend half the night lying awake thinking of all the things I could have said. Engaged him on his idea of an imaginary Dadaist Africa, for example. But I mangle it totally.

  “I’m a big fan, a huge fan. Such a big fan.”

  They stare at me, the journalist, the stick-insect curator and the famous architect with his sticky-up white hair and overbright eyes.

  After a pause, Pancho says, “Well, thank you,” waiting to see if I have anything to add, but equally ready to turn away politely. I lurch for the opening.

  “I just wanted to ask . . . I’m studying architecture, and I was wondering if you had any advice? For me. That could be useful . . .” I trail off lamely.

  He taps my collarbone once and says, “Young man. You have to find your own sense.”

  I will spend the other half of the night trying to figure out what that means.

  Nolly called it off yesterday.

  She said I’ve been great and she appreciates everything, but it’s like that movie Saw? She’s got this new perspective, and she’s realized it’s never going to work between us.

  “And seriously, baby,” she said, taking my hand, “you need to get your shit together.”

  As I’m leaving, the nurse calls me back to hand over a black bag full of junk: origami sculptures made from recycled blueprint paper and books and a porcelain flea-market menagerie.

  “At least she ate the chocolates,” the girl says, trying to cheer me up.

  The university has been very understanding. Within reason. My tutor has given me an extension, but deadlines are like lintels; they can only be moved out so far before the whole thing comes crashing down around your head.

  I stare at the model sports center and seriously consider smashing it to death with a frozen chicken. The girl stands next to me, her head tilted to the side, fingers pressed to her mouth, assessing it.

  “I mean, I know it’s supposed to be a sports center and everything. But it’s not the kind of place you could live,” is her considered conclusion.

  I snort. “This coming from the person who doesn’t.”

  “Live, you mean? I live. Kinda. With you. Except when you want to be alone. For sex and stuff.”

  “Yeah, about that. Maybe you should get your own place.”

  “Yeah, about that. Maybe you should make me one.”

  So I do.

  It’s tough for a ghost girl to get a lease agreement these days.

  It’s a monstrosity. It’s the best thing I’ve ever made.

  It’s part Pancho, part Frank, part Escher, part Sekwa.

  “And part Ruby,” the girl chimes in.

  “Well, finally. Is that your name?”

  “No,” she says. “But wouldn’t it be romantic if it was?”

  We stay up thirty-one hours straight constructing it out of balsa and yeah, bunched-up tinfoil. When the balsa won’t bend and buckle the way I need it to, we shear cool drink cans and beat them flat. Unhinged parabolas soaring up to pseudo turrets, plunging back into crenellated organic fissures and a spaghetti snarl of cables, like the energy lines that connect people, like “se-eee-x.” We populate the grounds with broken porcelain animals standing in for the traditional human figurines.

  “It’s a strange concoction of the imagination all right,” the girl says, admiring.

  “And a homeless shelter,” I add. “My social responsibility here is done. The question is, when are you going to move in?”

  “Are you nuts?” The ghost girl squinches up her face with perfect teen incredulity. “What, I’m just going to shrink down to size? I can’t do that. The actual question here is, when are you going to build me the real thing?”

  The examiner’s notes are snippy. “The work shows vigorous creativity, passable technical skill and a total inability to meet the purpose of the brief.”

  I fail.

  It’s worth it.

  I never wanted to be a journalist. The newspapers seemed all bore and gore—column space crammed with crime scene mop-ups, politicking and mawkish personality profiles. I also never planned to stay in Cape Town. When I came to the city in 1996, after a year of semi-feral gypsying around the world, it was supposed to be only for one indolent summer. I fully intended to return to Johannesburg, my hometown, to pavements slick with jacaranda blossoms and malls slick with money and skies bristling with violence at the tail end of sultry afternoons.

  Naturally, I wound up doing both. And almost a decade later, I find myself standing behind Khayelitsha’s taxi rank with Mr. Klaas, in his black and gold shirt and oversized Ray-Bans that come in s
omewhere between pantsula and The Sopranos. We are musing over a liquid smear of blood and scuffed gravel that seem to indicate that someone wounded or dead had been dragged away during the night, behind the stalls that sell sweeties and fruit and entjie cigarettes to commuters.

  Whatever act had been committed here wasn’t the point of the story I’d been commissioned to do by an Italian magazine, which activated its international correspondents in random scatter-shots with only a broad theme to guide us. Like we were enthusiastic entomologists set loose, bringing back intriguing specimens in our butterfly nets from which the editors could pick and choose.

  In this case, our brief was as simple as “slums.” The photographer and I had crashed a wedding party in Langa, intervened between feuding hair salons in Chinatown and eavesdropped on the phone calls sold roadside by entrepreneurs with mobile Telkom units. And all the while, we trailed a scraggle of children, an informal escort who tirelessly (and tiresomely) chanted “umlungu, umlungu,” in case the community hadn’t already noted the whiteys in their midst.

  In our wanderings, we’d met an amateur boxer and muscleman shebeen owner who also ran a games arcade in a dank shack across the way from his drinking hole, learned how to prepare smileys, the delicacy made from sheeps’ heads, and meticulously recorded the process for brewing traditional mqombothi beer with a nqali owner who quickly learned to ignore our pestering while she stirred the thick, fermenting sorghum mix in a metal drum.

  It was inevitable then, that we’d eventually come to Mr. Klaas and his vigilante group, the Peninsula Anti-Crime Association or PEACA. At the crime scene behind the taxi rank, Mr. Klaas grunts and turns away, striding back to PEACA’s office in a converted shipping container, pointedly ignoring the cluster of hopeful petitioners awaiting his attention. Inside, he explains, by way of our translator Themba, that PEACA was set up to prevent ex-struggle soldiers being let loose in the community without jobs—“like lions among the sheep,” says Mr. Klaas ominously.

  This way, he says, the lions are set to protect the kraal: they intervene in domestic violence or recover stolen goods, where the police cannot or will not assist. Like the case of the woman waiting outside, who does not trust that the restraining order she got from the courts will protect her from the boyfriend who has sworn to kill her and dump her body in a nearby dam.

  “You see,” Mr. Klaas says, not bothering to remove his shades, “there are some cases the police cannot actually at all solve. According to a number of certain rules the police should follow, like the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, they can’t enter all these areas. But PEACA is everywhere. PEACA does not have any boundaries.”

  It’s not entirely unlike my position, now that I’ve come to terms with it. I have an all-access pass to the city built into my job description. It’s landed me in precarious positions, like meeting with vigilantes (Themba will berate me later, saying he had to soften my questions, that I must be careful), but it’s also provided opportunities for more entertaining and even frivolous encounters.

  I’ve come at the city from every angle. Sent by tourist magazines to go scuba diving, spelunking and skydiving, I’ve seen the land stretched taut as a canvas painted in Mondrian blocks, rushing towards me through howling sky, inched down a rope into a darkness squeaky with bats under the Silvermine mountains and faced down a quintet of ragged-tooth sharks in an old-fashioned copper diving suit in the Cape Town aquarium.

  But mostly, it’s the cold-blooded interrogation I get off on. Journalism gives me license to intrude, to ask queasily personal questions of people like Riaan* (not his real name), a tattooed twenty-eight-year-old who knowingly passed HIV to his wife, Lizl*. Sitting in the downstairs coffee shop of the multinational corporation the couple work for as AIDS educators, I asked them if they were still in love, after all they’d been through. “We’ve been married for six years now,” Riaan said, rubbing the back of his hand, marred by white scars from punching in his car window, because, ironically, he’s the bitter one. “But if you watch Oprah Winfrey, you’ll know that love thing is just a phase.”

  “Like an infection,” Lizl added, straight-faced.

  Or of Roxy*, at the up-market brothel the Cape Ranch, who used to work the bedrooms but now does the front desk, who was very quick to answer when I ask if she’d want her fourteen-year-old daughter to get into the business. “No. I’ve got—she’s got big plans for herself. And I want her to stick to them. Ja. Even if she got retrenched, like me, I wouldn’t want her to. Rather get a waitressing job or something.” Or of Julie*, a hockey player with a bandaged toe (a mishap in the outside world rather than a fetishist turned violent), who said that working at the Ranch got her off drugs, helped her learn to enjoy sex and was paying for her kids to go to private school.

  It’s not always easy. In a stale room in Retreat, Michel*, a Rwandan refugee, is reluctant to talk and, even more so, to be photographed. “The people we live with, we don’t talk about this. There were people who killed who left Rwanda to come here as refugees as well. Hutus and Tsutsis. We don’t know who they are or what they have done.” He lends me a documentary video instead, that he keeps behind the battered fifties kitchen cabinet that would fetch good money, something I know from doing a story on antique shops.

  And in a bed at the Brooklyn Chest Hospital, where Joseph* is dying, my eighteen-year-old half-brother Thabo, who is translating and acting as photographer’s assistant, has to intervene. “He’s really tired.”

  “Five more minutes,” the photographer says, because we have to get this shot, the sharp sculptural geometries of Joseph’s bones, his body limp and brittle as the thin white voile curtains framing the windows.

  Of course, it didn’t mean anything to Joseph that his image was the perfect embodiment of the twin pandemics of AIDS and tuberculosis, that the photographs were ideal for the World Health Organization report we were contributing to, that they might inform and educate and maybe even incite people to action. “What is it going to do for me?” Joseph hissed through his teeth, flipping the question.

  When I first moved to Cape Town, I would get lost. The geography defied me, despite having the landmark of Table Mountain to navigate by, and it didn’t help that my job sent me careening around the city from rough-hewn Bellville (cellular chip technology, kiteboarding) to an exclusive boys’ school in leafy Rondebosch (teen sexuality) to the low-income apartheid estate Bonteheuwel (graffiti artists, taxi drivers). I would usually be able to get myself home by steering a random course in approximately the right direction, but it was always a surprise when I’d round a corner and reconnect with an area I knew and a missing piece would slot neatly into place.

  While the unexpected shortcuts I find while driving reconfigure the physical construct of the city I carry in my head, the encounters I have recalibrate my understanding of it.

  My lazy conclusions about a proposed nuclear pebble-bed reactor are thrown off course, for example, after lunch with an energy expert from the University of Cape Town, who says if we could capture the poisonous substances expelled by coal plants the same way we separate nuclear waste, it would be hailed as an environmental breakthrough. “The irrational phobias against nuclear power are usually the domain of rich people in rich countries,” he says, “In South Africa, thousands of people don’t have any power at all, and thousands more die every year from paraffin fires.” But nuclear power is “unfashionable.” He declines to be quoted by name for fear of losing out on grants.

  This comes into perspective, traipsing around Barcelona, in Khayelitsha, with a pair of cable thieves named Godfrey and Andile who explain everything in the third person, as if they are not actually the ones who “climb up the poles, mos, like this one, like Tarzan,” to break the power cables and steal the copper intestines for resale.

  This time we have collected a following of adults, chanting “iz’nyoka,” inspired by the Eskom TV ads that vilify people like Godfrey and Andile as “snakes.” Godfrey shrugs it off: “No, they are not talking abo
ut us. It is iz’nyoka because the electricity is very quick to kill you. It bites you like a snake. On TV, they tell you, it can kill you first time.”

  The context expands again, in a labyrinth of shacks in Nyanga, where there is no electricity at all, not even the illegal connections that sag in snares across the dirt roads elsewhere. Our guide Pele tells us that here people live in fear of tsotsis who come in under cover of the absolute blackness to rob and rape. “Hooo. You won’t find me here at night,” he says.

  He takes us to visit his friend David who lives in a miserable shack that smells of damp and bare earth. There is a battered fridge in one corner, used as a cupboard, and in another a metal drum in which a fire can be built, because the paraffin stove (the kind that sets neighborhoods ablaze) doesn’t provide enough warmth.

  And David’s home forces me to shift and intertwine the categories again. On the walls, made of ragged pieces of cardboard and chipboard, there is a clothing-store poster advertising a competition to win twenty grand for your child’s education—all those zeroes insistent above the grinning faces of white children. But there are also patches of faded blue wallpaper, adorned with cats and monkeys in frilly Edwardian outfits, all floppy hats and capes. It reminds me with a wrench of a Tamboerskloof home where the filmmaker couple (allegedly with a cocaine habit, but that didn’t make it into the décor magazine story) had covered their little blonde daughter’s bedroom in a similar wallpaper.

  Likewise, the image of Joseph dying of AIDS and TB, which the WHO never used, becomes inextricably tangled with a story I did on an upmarket swingers club and my meetings with Karl*, the middle-class teenage vampire who swaps swigs of blood from open wrists with his Goth friends.

  But all of these are only snapshots. The encounters are glancing, a single serving before I move on to the next story. As much as I am driven by curiosity and the desire to distill the world in words, I don’t follow up unless I’m paid to. I have no idea how much longer Joseph lived or if Lizl and Riaan are still married, if he is still angry, whether Julie still turns tricks in an over-plush room with lace curtains, or if PEACA’s warning to the violent boyfriend turned physical, as it so often has in the past. And I still I have no idea who was injured or killed behind the taxi rank.