Such a Lonely, Lovely Road

by Kagiso Lesego Molope

  When I crossed the road he didn’t turn back, walking me all the way up the hill.

  He said: “Your father . . . he doesn’t smile very much.”

  I laughed. All people ever said about my father was that he was a good doctor, respectable, admirable. I was surprised to feel relief when Sediba spoke about him the way I saw him. It was true, my father could be aloof. At that time, right before I left for varsity, I was spending more time with him at his surgery. Always busy and focused, he was a man married to his work. I thought it was lucky that I wanted the same career; or I’m not sure I’d have had a chance to know him at all.

  “He’s strict, neh?” Sediba said, chuckling with me. “He’s not like my father.”

  “No,” I said. “Your father whistles.”

  “He what?”

  “He whistles! He sings and he dances. Look, even when listening to his favourite song, my father is quiet.”

  “Yah, my parents are good-times people. They used to wake me up in the middle of the night to go home, after I had slept on the bed at their friends’ houses.” They were so unlike my parents, I thought. I had seen his father with his hand sliding around his wife’s waist. I had seen his mother rub her hand up and down her husband’s beard.

  The conversation was so smooth, so easy. We kept stopping and laughing all along the way, me forgetting about being seen, and then we were at my gate before I knew it.

  I wanted him to linger or come inside, but he said, “I’ll see you, Jo,” with a wide grin. Before I could say anything in reply he was walking backwards down the hill, waving. And I was sorry he hadn’t hesitated.

  The next night, after an evening with our friends, I left them a little early, and before I reached the street corner, there he was at my side again, this time holding up a plastic bag. “New tapes,” he said. Then we sat in his backyard, listening to new kwaito songs, sipping Coke and eating biscuits on the back lawn just behind the house, where no one could see.

  Sediba was a keen listener. He liked to ask questions and then sit back and listen as I replied without stopping, going far beyond the actual answer. With my parents and friends, conversation was guarded. Always afraid that I might say something that could land me into a trap, I chose my words carefully. People called me things they call you when you’re too afraid to talk: quiet, thoughtful, shy. I was just scared.

  While Lelo, Trunka, and Base had always been my closest childhood friends, starting around fourteen they had had nothing but girls on their minds and talk of sex had taken over our conversations. I laughed at their jokes and once in a while pretended to know what they were talking about, but it was becoming tedious. Sediba had learned to evade the big issues in his life by finding plenty of other things to talk about. Whenever I heard him say something in a group it was safe but interesting. He had mastered the art of sidestepping without showing it. He seemed friendly and unguarded, but he still had that thing about him: the thing that stopped people from asking too much for fear of sounding too familiar.

  When he talked about himself, he let you think he was opening up, but I knew he stayed very quiet about what could get him into trouble. “I want my own line of hair products, Jo. There are guys doing it for themselves. I want shampoos and oils that smell of peppermint, lilac, sage, and lavender.” He was intrigued by scents. While the rest of us were constantly spraying ourselves with something so strong that you could almost smell it from a across the street, he was the only guy I knew who preferred a grapefruit body cream to strong men’s cologne. He wanted his own house as soon as he finished varsity and he wanted to stay close to home, where he hoped more than anything to open his own salon. I didn’t understand that part. I didn’t understand not wanting to run away from here.

  He said, “My mother has been working out of that back room for so long, I think this might be the year we finally open something. But she says no, I have to go to varsity first, I have to study business and then we’ll talk about me opening a salon. So that’s where I’m going next year.”

  On these secret evenings we’d lie side by side on the lawn almost—just almost—touching. I had to stop my body moving towards him, his shape, his scent; his words and his skin so inviting that staying still was nearly impossible and leaving him always a arduous process of lifting and pulling myself away. Every morning I couldn’t wait for the day to end so that I could be with him.

  We fell into a routine over the next few weeks, our time together lulled by summer’s easy passing. Both of us worked in the day—I helped my mother at her shop, working at the till or stocking up shelves—and if my father needed me at the reception desk in his clinic I would be there. Sediba also helped both his parents at their work places. As soon as I was finished, I’d run home and wash, spray cologne and put in an appearance at Trunka, Lelo, or Base’s then finally, either Sediba would go home and I’d follow afterwards or I’d leave first. Some nights he’d climb over our high gate and come to my backyard, where I would be sitting with cold drinks waiting for him. My parents, pleased with my performance in school and excited by my early acceptance into UCT, were now making some allowances. Beer was, in my mother’s words, “OK in moderation.” Sometimes we took the beer that my mother bought for my father, though he was never home long enough to sit and drink it. We’d sip from the same beer because neither one of us could finish an entire bottle alone. At least that’s what we said to each other. That was the reason we agreed on.

  My parents didn’t mind him coming and going, and they said nothing about me spending long hours out some nights. Until the matric results were out, they would each fuss in their own way, my father calling me to the surgery all the time, trying to convince me that medicine was the right thing for me as if not wanting me to forget though all I did there was greet people, answer the phone, and write down messages. Maybe it was his way of having me close to him just one last time. Or maybe he noticed changes in me and wanted to be sure it was not my love for medicine that was slipping away. Then there was my mother, saying, “I’ll come down to Cape Town a few times a year. I’ve always loved Cape Town,” making my heart sink. On the nights my father was not home for supper, the two of us sat eating alone and she’d say something like, “Maybe you could consider staying close. Maybe then we could see you more often.” I would pick up my glass of water and smile, thinking, never.

  I would tell her, “UCT’s the best, Ma. And you always say you’d love to come to Cape Town.”

  But then because summer has that mollifying effect on people, settles their nerves, by the end of December they were much more relaxed about me.

  I came to look forward to seeing Sediba a lot more than to sitting around Trunka’s house listening to vivid descriptions of women’s bodies, cringing but also curious about what it was they found so irresistible. I went to see my friends less and less. Some evenings I’d go straight home after my work at the shop or the surgery, and wait for Sediba to come after finishing at his mother’s salon. My growing affection for him was the first thing that had ever rivalled my love for medicine.

  “Are you excited to leave?” he asked me towards the end, looking me in the eye in that way that sometimes felt a little bit sad and desperate—his face carrying more than his words could convey.

  “I was—I mean, I am. I am excited.” My throat felt dry.

  “Won’t you miss home?”

  It took everything in me to stay still and keep my eyes on him.

  “I will, Jo. I’ll miss home a lot.”

  It was one of many fleeting moments when I saw us stopping, no longer dodging each other.

  But then very quickly he said, “I’ve heard about guys taking their time getting to Cape Town, getting up to no good on the way,” and like that we had shifted to safer ground.

  There were two things we were aware of: First, my father had sewn stitches on the foreheads of comrades after prison stin
ts, and his mother had hidden rioters in the back room of her salon. Our desires were strong but we knew we would never be seen as manly or African enough. What we wanted, the things we longed for in silence, were seen by our people as white and un-African. And second, being the only children to our parents, Sediba and I were star sons, model citizens. We had been groomed to be the boys who would come back and be our fathers’ sons. “Don’t bring all eyes on us” was one of my mother’s favourite sayings. O sa re tsenyetsa matlho.

  As my departure drew near, my parents decided to throw me a going-away party. A braai in our backyard.

  I had expected it, of course; it is the ceremony that naturally follows when you’ve done well. A party for my mother to show everyone I was everything she had always said I was. See? All those school reports, all those science and biology trophies displayed in our dining room led to this moment. So just about everyone we knew was going to be invited to our house on my last Friday afternoon, the day before I was scheduled to leave, to eat and drink to their hearts’ content.

  Alone in my room, every night after Sediba left I would wonder what it would be like for me to be open and honest with him, imagining us letting go and giving in to our feelings. What would that be like? What would I say? Every time I was near him, I felt parts of me tugging, suppressed longings being pulled out from their safe hiding spaces and called to life. I’d watch him climb up the wall and the gate and jump down, his arm muscles bulging with his every move, shirt riding up to reveal more of him, and I could hardly breathe. Every time he left I had the unsettling urge to beg him to stay, to risk the scorn and the disappointment that would surely come tumbling down upon us, to put everything out in the open. I never did that. I could sometimes see his step slowing, his arms folding as if to stop himself from touching me, his eyes staying on me a bit longer. He never said anything either and I worried that we’d go on like this and then leave and go our separate ways—possibly never to have the chance again.

  So that day, when my mother came home in the afternoon and announced, while taking count of the liquor bottles in the house, that there would be a party, I felt the end approaching. I thought: now or never.

  There was a lot of sadness in the house on the day of the party. I had found my mother crying in her bedroom that morning, her chin trembling, palm pressed against her cheek. When I asked her what was wrong, she said, “I’m going to miss you so much,” but I had the feeling that there was much more to her crying than that. “The good news is,” she started, blotting her tears with a tissue, “I invited Tiny and she’s bringing her niece.” Her smile was genuine. I bit my lip.

  Then, mysteriously—because neither one of my parents would say why—Aus’ Tselane was not there the whole day and my mother brought in two of her employees from the shop to help with setting up. I ran around all day packing my bags and buying last-minute things, not entirely looking forward to the evening. My friends from school—Beast, Mohale, Dave and Elliot—who were also coming to UCT—had phoned several times asking questions like, “Should we bring pillows or do you think they provide them at the res?” and “There’s enough beer in the cooler but not enough wine. Can you bring more?” We were all frantic, trying to make the transition from home to varsity as smooth and tolerable as we could. The phone calls were merely a sort of handholding we needed from each other. I was getting more excited until someone said, “Can you imagine the number of chicks we’ll suddenly be surrounded by?” Then I felt like no one was holding my hand.

  My spirits lifted when evening came, and then dropped again. Sediba was especially handsome in a crisp white short-sleeve shirt and a pair of dark blue jeans that looked new. He arrived with our other friends: Lelo, Trunka and Base, who were all wearing nice clothes for the occasion. Dark blue jeans and their shirts bright, crisp, and new. But Sediba stayed in the background and looked more nervous and less self-assured than I was used to seeing. The other guys were in top form. No Kasi boy ever misses an opportunity to dress up. They liked labels, called their shoes things like Kurt Geiger instead of just shoes and their shirts had to be Lacoste and not just a shirt. Trunka wore a rather dapper golf hat that he had turned slightly to the side and Lelo had very shiny black Kurt Geiger shoes. I was being given a proper send-off.

  Sediba and I behaved as we usually did, barely acknowledging each other and skillfully keeping our distance, never sitting or standing next to each other at any moment. That party was the first time it occurred to me that for all the time we had spent together no one actually knew we had become close friends. We hadn’t done anything that anyone would disapprove of, but it was as if the mere knowledge that we enjoyed each other’s company might tip people off about what else we had in common.

  As the hours passed the party became more and more torturous for me. Aus’ Tiny, my mother’s friend, arrived as expected with her husband and niece, whose name was Tshidi. The girl was tall and slim, strode in with confidence and (thankfully) set her eyes on Lelo. Girls usually did.

  Sediba was fully aware of what was happening. He had been keeping his distance before but still stealing glances and giving me knowing looks. Now he was just plain ignoring me. It stung. I suppose it was hard to ignore my mother hurrying around in high heels and a glass of wine—one glass too many—saying, “Kabi! Kabi! See what Tshidi needs. Get Tshidi something to eat. Sit next to Tshidi, she doesn’t know anyone.” This was my mother: Other people’s parents would only show an interest in girls they brought home. My mother took initiative and brought me a girl.

  I’d once heard her tell her friends, “He’s just shy, my baby. He’s not like your sons. He just needs a little push.”

  Lelo rose to the occasion. As soon as he saw Tshidi’s eyes on him the two of them were off in a corner. He was bringing her a plate of food, giving her a chair to sit on. He wasn’t really interested, but that’s always been irrelevant with Lelo. If there’s a girl and she’s interested you go over, you talk, you seduce. It’s the principle of the thing: be a man, no matter what. He was the guy who had learned how to break into a car and steal the sound system. “Everything plus the speakers,” he’d told us. Because “a man has to learn these things.” He said he dragged himself up the hill every day to UNISA to get a law degree for the same reason. A man has to learn these things.

  My mother walked over and pulled me aside: “Why do you leave her alone with him?” I shrugged—which, I realized, only worked to convince her that I needed her help.

  “He’s not better than you, you know. None of those boys are.” I went to help my father with the meat on the braai stand.

  Seeing Sediba so assiduously avoiding me, I became more and more restless and agitated. I was gripped by the fear that I might never see him again and thought: and this would be how it ends? What if I never again have the chance to see what it’s like to kiss someone I actually really like? I so badly wanted us to have a little time to ourselves after everyone was gone. But even as the thought frightened me I wondered if and how that goodbye could be prolonged.

  But what was prolonged was the party. My friends showed no signs of wanting to leave, which was exactly the way I might have like it, had I not had anything else on my mind.

  They stayed late to help clean up the mess around the yard and even in the house. Then, just as I thought they’d leave, they sat down on the lawn, legs stretched out, reminiscing in that way that we all tend to do when getting ready to say goodbye. We watched Lelo walk Tshidi to Aus’ Tiny’s car, her smile wide and content. Lelo said something in her ear and she shrugged one shoulder, the smile not leaving her face. This was his show.

  We’d all seen it countless times. He’d make no attempt to see her again after this, and you felt sorry for her even as some part of you was in awe of his skill. That thing that holds a girl’s attention: I’d never had that. To be fair, I’d never wanted it, not with girls anyway, but skill is skill and you can’t help but marvel and a
dmire when someone excels.

  Then he was back and lounging with us on the lawn, a satisfied smirk all over his face. It was what my mother couldn’t stand about Lelo, this smirking, the confidence she saw as insolence. She didn’t understand his self-assured manner, his refusal to act as if he didn’t belong, while I needed a push and a shove just to speak to people. She didn’t know how he saw the scene with Tshidi. He had won at a man’s game. And he had won against me.

  I don’t know why he and I kept at it all those years, why I always wanted to measure up, because if he was always winning then it wasn’t much of a competition, but it did go on much longer than it should have. When we settled down I turned up the music. Old R&B was now on, songs that were the soundtrack to our childhood. We wound down the evening with stories going back to the time before Sediba came, and when we talked about the day he arrived we graciously left out the embarrassing bits.

  Lelo said, “We were all thinking: Hao! Who is this guy dressed like it’s Sunday?” And we all laughed, pretending we hadn’t minded him then, that we had welcomed him with open arms from the very beginning.

  But there was a part of me—the part that remembered what Lelo had said after that first time we met Sediba—that cringed at hearing him reminisce. “Eish, Jo. All of us covered in dust because we had been playing soccer and your moving van had come barreling down the street!” And Trunka said, “Seriously Jo, how did you go that long without getting dirty?” Sediba replied: “My mother made sure of it.”

  We laughed at that. Everyone knew Sediba’s mother was as clean as they come, so this led to us talking about our mothers and their cleanliness. We stuck to the polite details.