They stayed longer, finishing their beers and looking more and more sloshed by the minute. Then of course it was Lelo’s turn—because Lelo always needed a turn, to have us engrossed in one of his stories.
“Eintlik, I’m happy the two of you are leaving,” he started, pointing from me to Sediba. “I’m going for one of your Gradus.”
The guys called the girls from the multiracial Model C schools “Gradus,” for “Graduates.” I didn’t really know why. Lelo had long been pulled towards the kind of girls Sediba and I went to school with, finding them annoying, fascinating, and amusing all at once. Mainly, I think, he treated them like a challenge he had to take on. Something to do with not being able to go to those same private schools himself.
“You have the ones who want a movie date before taking their panties off, Jo,” he liked to tell us and that night he repeated himself. Adding: “But not with me. With guys like me they want to go home first. Girls like that, they live for that moment when their mother wakes up to find you running out of her bedroom, pulling your shirt on. And me,” his laughter came up like a roar from his belly, “me, I love to hear that ou’ lady screaming, ‘What school does he even go to?’ ” We were always thoroughly entertained by Lelo, even though I never missed the hint of scorn in his jokes about the Gradus.
“So now I have this sweet one, neh? Her name is Masechaba. She’s the head girl at St Mary’s. So, I’m running out of her room the other day and her mother says: ‘Sies! What school does this one go to?’ She has her fists on her hips and my girl is in nothing but a t-shirt behind me. Die ou’ lady looks at me like she’s never smelled anything so foul. She says: ‘What does he want?’ and my girl says—hahaaaaa!—she says: ‘Mama, he wants me!’ Yoh! I’ll never forget it Gents.”
He rolled onto his back. “Fuck your schools Mama. Your daughter wants a real man,” he quickly glanced at me and then took a swig of his beer.
I wiped my brow because I imagined I was sweating, but I wasn’t. I could have let it go on but instead I turned to Base.
“You know I was just saying to someone the other day,” I said, without looking at Sediba, “That you could be like that guy Mike from Boyz II Men!”
Base smiled, chuffed. He asked, “Who were you saying it to?”
I shrugged and bit my lip. “Haai, just one of my friends from school.”
“Not a cherrie? Come on Jo, tell those things to a cherrie around here and I can”—he held out two fists as if grabbing hold of someone and moved his hips back and forth.
We all laughed. Then he was fishing through his pockets and came out with a purple box in his hand, which he threw at me and said, “For you, Mfana. Use it before the end of the first week. All those cherries, far from home and looking for a man to hold onto.” He wrapped his arms around his chest, demonstrating. Lelo nearly spat out his beer from laughing. He walked over and opened the box, pulling out the condoms in a black wrapper and letting them fall down in one long line as if he’d just performed a magic trick. I shifted in my seat and put down my beer, laughing, careful to keep my eyes away from Sediba.
Lelo cut one off. “I’ll take one just for tonight.” His eyes stayed on me like he was examining suspicious fruit. “Will you use these?” He made as if to hide them behind his back. I laughed, coughed. “Seriously. Because if you won’t, I will, Jo.”
I snatched them from him. “That’s my present, neh? Give it back.”
Base said, “Of course he’ll use it, Lelo. He’s a free man now. No parents watching.”
Admittedly I did have what I called a girl-of-the-moment situation. I was always seeing someone, playing coy when anyone asked for details and then getting to know the girl just enough to be able to talk about her. I had chosen to stay at home and not be at boarding school like most of my friends because then I could avoid the weekend jaunts into town and into our sister school. I could tell my school friends about a girl without them having a chance to get a good idea of our relationship.
So, just before I left home and right after I started spending time with Sediba, I had stopped speaking to a girl from our sister school. We’d been dating, meaning that I took her to the movies and paid for everything, kissing her afterward even though she was not who I thought of when I did. She phoned every now and then, making my mother giddy with approval. Mamello was her name. A big-eyed, petite girl with lips that looked as though she wore dark lipstick when she didn’t. I wished—as I had with other girls before her—that I could tell her I liked her and mean it. Whenever she phoned my mother would pick up and call my name in a sweet melodic voice: “Kabi! Ke Mamello.” It didn’t matter what I was doing, my mother would insist I stop and come to the phone right away.
“She has a nice voice,” she’d whispered to me once. “We’d love to meet her.”
Now, as if knowing exactly where my mind was Lelo said, “Mamello’s not coming with you, Jo. So have the time of your life.”
My eyes flew to Sediba. “That’s over,” I said.
I had never mentioned her to Sediba, only to Lelo a few times, because I needed to keep him up to date with my attempts at becoming the type of man he and my parents wished I could be. I winced when he said her name, clutching the condom box my eyes shifty. It felt like a betrayal.
Trunka asked, “Who is Mamello?”
“A girl who wants him. Or does she have you, Jo?”
Lelo rarely spoke English and I couldn’t help but think there was always a hint of mockery when he did. I sat up and smiled, shaking my head.
“It’s old news, gents. I’m going to Cape Town a single man.”
“Sure. Sure Jo. It’s your time.” They spoke in such sincere, encouraging tones that I very nearly cried. Then I did look at Sediba and found him less bothered than I had expected. I thought his smile was some mixture of pity and understanding and I wished I hadn’t seen it.
Pocketing the box of condoms, I gathered the empty beer bottles and took them inside the house. Through the kitchen window I could see them all in the backyard, teasing and playfully hitting each other and laughing.
I was grateful to have this loving group of people who had known and played with me for as long as I could remember; almost all of us had been growing up in the houses our parents had bought before we were born. I panicked at the thought of them not being there with me in this next phase of my life, wishing I could take them with me because even though I was going with my friends from school I thought about how large and scary UCT was going to be and I wanted to have people who spoke the same language as I did in more ways than one.
Then I looked at Sediba lying on his side, his eyes closed as he took in everything being said, and realized I wanted, maybe a little more desperately, to take him too, but if I wanted him the way I did then I couldn’t have the others. And if I did take them, then I would live separate lives at varsity, with my school friends up in the quiet residence at the top of the mountain and my home friends down in the more crowded, less polished residences that were typically reserved for Black students from Kasi schools. It wasn’t the first time that I was aware of the many lines that separated my many lives. It just seemed a little less bearable at that moment.
When they finally got up and sauntered towards the gate, Sediba slowed down, staying behind and patting his pockets. “I think I left my wallet where I was sitting,” he said, and I realized then how little he’d spoken that evening. We stood side by side and watched our friends go, moving in drunken zigzags down the hill.
“I’ll catch up!” Sediba called out to them. “Don’t wait, I have to look.” They were too drunk to hear or care.
Then it was just the two of us.
My parents had left earlier to take the party to one of their friends’ houses. Sometime in the middle of our drinking, joking, and singing the sun had disappeared, leaving only the nightlights, which lit the path leading
from our backyard to the river rock. I bit my lip and followed Sediba to the backyard.
He walked past the house and the backrooms towards the pool and I walked behind, as slowly and as steadily as I could. Our shoes crunched the river rocks along the path, the only sound you could hear apart form the crickets. Here and there a lizard slithered up a wall. I was surprised at how fearless I suddenly felt, how much I wanted to leap forward and put my arms around his waist.
I had led a girl away from a crowd and into one of those spaces people disappear to when they want privacy, when they want to feel things that their friends talk about on Monday at break or in the change room after a game. I had been here before, but it had been as an actor in a play—only doing what everyone else did, without my heart in it. Now it was like going towards something both exciting and dangerous, like I had spent my teens waiting for this door to open and couldn’t wait to find out where it led. It was hard work trying not to run over, not to rush.
When we got to the back, behind the house and in front of my mother’s pissing-boy fountain, Sediba suddenly turned around and pushed a small, gift-wrapped box towards me. I saw the corners of his mouth tremble, his eyes darting from me to the box and back like he was worried this might not end well.
It was not quite as bright in the back as on the path, even with the lights around the garden. I swallowed and tried to smile but I couldn’t. All I did was shiver slightly. I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else, “What? You got me a gift?” It sounded like something I’d heard in a movie.
“Open it. Now or tomorrow. It’s up to you.” His shrug was forced, his eyes on the box now in my hands.
My fingers fumbled with the wrapping. Then I tore it off, sorry because it had been wrapped so perfectly. Inside was a camera. He had remembered that I had wished for one and had one day mentioned it when I had read in a magazine about exactly this kind.
I was overwhelmed with gratitude, sadness and excitement. I felt that part of me that was always hiding, that was always alone, come out even more than it had in the times we had spent together. My heart raced, the weight of secrecy lifting. I wanted that very moment to go on and on, for my parents to never come back home, for Sediba never to leave. I looked at him without saying anything, my eyes on his, my right hand going to take his left.
It was he who came forward first, hesitantly, as if confirming I was alright with it. There was a lilac and mint soap that he often used—that he had shown me once when I had boldly asked him what he used because I liked the smell. Now I could smell the green and white bar on his clothes. It made parts of my body shift in understanding—it made me close my eyes and put my hand on the back of his neck and pull him into me. His lips landed softly on mine and then I opened my mouth, the tip of my tongue brushing against his.
It only lasted a few seconds before we heard footsteps and a soft voice say, “Kabi?”
In a moment of fear and panic, I pushed Sediba into a nearby rosebush and watched his body land helplessly against the thorns. I could tell by the sound he let out that he was more hurt than surprised.
Aus’ Tselane had returned. I wasn’t sure how much she had seen in the dark but I was sure she hadn’t missed the push. Sediba came back up with great effort, then bent double as if he’d been punched in the stomach, letting out a small whimper. I turned around and ran into the house and left him and Aus’ Tselane there, staring at each other.
In my room I cried more than I ever had in my life, sobbing until I fell sleep. I dreamed of him falling, then getting up, coming away with me, running his hand down my bare back. All night his scent stayed in my nose and I held his hand, and when I woke up there was only the camera in my hand, my eyes puffy and my body refusing to get out of bed.
I hated him—or wanted to.
Later, after rearranging the clothes in my bags, double-checking the list my mother had made for me, I went out and walked around the backyard—saying goodbye to the place—and found the weight of my sadness too much to bear. My mother’s roses were in bloom: the green garden dotted with yellow, white, and red flowers, all wrapped and cheerful along the high wall that was our fence. The pool was empty and the backyard clean—there were hardly any traces of the party left, except where Sediba and I had stood there was a piece of paper that must have fallen out when he gave me his present. I picked it up and put it in my pocket without reading it.
I decided then that I would go away from here, become someone else, find other people to be gay with, far away from anyone I knew. And I worked and worked at my heart, telling it not to stay here, in this place that didn’t know me. I tried to remember how desperately I had always wanted to leave, but I couldn’t quite capture the excitement I had felt when my father had brought home that acceptance letter from UCT—because he had given the university the surgery’s address, wanting to be the first to get the news.
Sediba was merely a crush—a first boy kiss—I told myself. I would leave Kasi and so would he and we would forget each other. Maybe someday we would see each other across the street and then stop to talk about how we were. Anyway, we were eighteen and going off to different parts of the country—seventeen hours apart.
I went inside and rearranged my packing once again and then stepped out again. My mother made me food and my father was in and out of the house. Finally I sat outside and waited for them.
By the time they both emerged from the house with my bags, my mother’s eyes red and my father anxiously throwing his keys from one hand to the other, I was more than ready to go. In one hour I would be at the train station. In just over twenty hours I would be in Cape Town. When my mother took a step away from my father’s touch I pretended not to see.
“Kabi? O right?” she was saying as she brushed off nothing from her dress like she was brushing away his touch. “Let’s go, it’s time.”
My father’s eyes were all sadness but he managed a smile. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “This is it, monna.” I nodded and walked to the car. This was it. I wouldn’t take any of this with me, I would become a free man, I insisted to myself. Yet even as our car drove down the hill and my mother hooted at my friends sitting around Trunka’s family tuck shop, I was bitterly disappointed not to get one last glimpse of Sediba.
Cape Town
WHEN I CUT THROUGH THE CROWDS inside Park Station that February morning, sweating from the end-of-summer heat, I didn’t even look back at my parents or wait for them to catch up. I ran ahead with my large suitcase and equally large shoulder bag, the box of condoms in my right pocket and my grin too wide for me to pass for sane or sober. For that moment I’d put the previous night behind me: I was eighteen and couldn’t bear it anymore: perfect school marks, impeccable behaviour, the son the neighbours wished they had. Fuelled by curiosity about a world in which I didn’t have to be anything to anyone, for me varsity couldn’t have come soon enough.
My parents were dressed up as if they were seeing off a dignitary: my father in a navy blazer and my mother with makeup a touch lighter than her summer skin, too much lipstick, and heels too high for just a quick ’bye at a dusty train station. She was fussing: “Do you have enough toothpaste? We bought everything we could think of, but there’s always something . . . ” When she asked if I wanted to open my bag again and count the number of shirts I had, it was too much. I exchanged a solemn handshake with my father and kissed my mother goodbye and then I just ran forward and hopped onto the train.
I couldn’t believe this trip across the country, all the way to the tip of Africa, was mine and mine alone. The friends I was traveling with from school would be the only people I knew and they were already putting on their earphones, getting ready to settle in and relax all the way down. Seventeen hours was how long the journey would be. My body may have still been in the north of the country but my mind had leapt forward and was far away already.
In my pocket of course
I still had that note—and when my fingers went to touch it my heart swelled, a bubble caught in my throat. I had memorized it on the way to the station, sitting in the back seat as my parents turned up the music to disguise the silence between them. I read it over and over until I couldn’t anymore, until all I could do was watch the landscape change from the flat and dusty streets of Kasi to the vast expansion that separated Black people’s cluster of homes from White people’s paved residential streets. I watched the buildings rise and rise until I couldn’t deny that while I was anxious to leave, I felt wretched about the night before, the note, the kiss, everything.
The handwriting was so neat. It said:
Kabza,
Take this and don’t be afraid to use it. Use it every chance you get.
Forget about everything. You are destined for great things. Show them what you’re made of!
Have a safe trip Jo,
S
I kept it in my left pocket, pressed against the condoms. Then I chewed mindlessly on some peanuts from the bag my mother had packed me that morning. The beer swirling in my brain, I recalled her hands trembling as she sliced my cheese-and-tomato sandwich into eight perfect triangles—the way I had liked since my first day in grade one. My father had supervised the cleaning of his car as a way of staying out of the house and I had busied myself with the packing, pretending I didn’t know each was terrified of being left alone with the other.
When remembering home became too much, I reached into the other bag and caressed the camera that had come with the note. It was a small Kodak Eastman, 35mm. Exactly the one I had talked to Sediba about for weeks as we sat alone in my parents’ backyard trying not to look each other in the eye. But that memory proved to be too heavy as well, and I quickly pulled my hand away from my bag, as if I had just teased a caged animal and had to suddenly escape its bite.
***
So it was a great relief when Cape Town first came into view.
Such a Lonely, Lovely Road Page 4
