It was strange what small things it took to make you feel found out. Even stranger and still a mystery to me was how I could work so hard at hiding something and still have the odd person not only find out but be so very sure of what they thought they knew.
Later when Andrew drove me home after insisting and I relented because I realised it was his way of apologizing for intruding, we kept the topics on patients and the hospital. We were laughing about a gift an attractive young patient had given him—a pretty glass vase that she instructed him to put in his dining room “where everyone could see it.”
“You know it’s against the rules to phone her, don’t you?” I was saying, when Andrew, who was looking straight ahead, said: “Wow, who is that?”
When I looked I saw Sediba leaning against the bonnet of his car, arms folded, head turned all the way up and looking at the sky, like a child who had just spotted an airplane. He had come a day earlier. I felt as though I had just walked into an airless room. I opened the window and took deep breaths.
Andrew said: “Oh, look at you!”
“What? Look at me what?”
“Who is he? Do you know him? I mean, hell, I’m a straight man but even I can see that guy is hot.”
The thing about Sediba was that his looks and the way people stopped to stare had hardly changed. He was still that quiet boy in a blue and white scarf sitting cross-legged in front of his parents’ house. It wasn’t so much that people thought he was handsome, but that he had an air of importance about him, a strong and intimidating presence. That day he was wearing a beige and black fedora with a pair of sunglasses. People always felt a little bit out of his league, like he was from a grander place than the one they lived in.
I shrugged and tried to sound nonchalant as I stepped out of the car, with, “Oh, he’s a childhood friend. Why don’t we talk tomorrow?”
“I’m not on tomorrow,” Andrew said, and then to my dismay, turned off the car and opened his door.
“Where are you going?”
“To meet your childhood friend,” he said as if it was the most natural and polite thing to do and I was the odd one for being surprised.
He hurried up to Sediba, who seemed to only now be noticing us. I frowned a bit at Sediba and nodded my head in Andrew’s direction.
Andrew said, “Hi, hi I’m Andrew,” his hand flying out eagerly to shake Sediba’s. He fixed his shirt and I knew right then that he was feeling uneasy.
Sediba held out his hand and then added to the handshake by placing his left hand on top of both their hands and smiled into Andrew’s eyes.
Andrew was impressed. He looked Sediba up and down in true Andrew fashion: shamelessly, without any attempt at hiding his admiration. But Sediba was used to people staring. He smiled politely and asked questions to divert attention.
“So do you work at the same hospital? How do you find it?”
While Andrew chatted away about patient load and trying to learn isiZulu, Sediba kept the conversation flowing by offering bits and pieces that were really nothing if you thought about them but to the listener felt like he was disclosing intimate details about his life. It was the intent eye contact that fooled.
“Kabza and I grew up together. We moved within the same pack. You know how wild township boys are. We drove our mothers mad. You know what I mean. Anywhere you grow up, all boys get up to a lot of nonsense, right?”
Andrew was nodding away, absorbed, growing more and more comfortable. I reckoned he felt more of a connection in those five minutes with Sediba than he had ever felt with me, and being the guy who always craved a good talk, he was getting ready to settle into long conversation. Sediba was so good at this that he even made me believe what he was saying, that we had actually always been friends, that we had run around “within the same pack” instead of moving in circles, avoiding each other.
Finally, it took was a pleading look from me for Sediba to swiftly glance at his watch and gasp, “Eish! I really should watch the time. Kabza! Let me give you the things your mother sent and then be on my way.”
And with a look of disappointment Andrew said, “OK, then. I guess I’d better run.”
Shadows were growing longer, the light becoming faint in the horizon. Sediba and I watched Andrew drive away, and then we looked at each other with a knowing look. The walk up to my flat felt long. We were running up and practically sprinting to my door. My shirt was half off before he closed the door behind him and both of us were kicking our shoes off and very nearly tore each other’s clothes off, kissing and pulling impatiently as we fell to the sofa.
“That was the fastest I have ever done that,” Sediba said when we finally sat up, panting.
I kissed the smooth skin on his clean-shaven chest, my lips moving against his sweat.
“It was?” I said, genuinely surprised. For me, quickly and quietly was the only way I had ever had sex before him.
“I don’t know,” he said, kissing my forehead. “I like taking my time.”
I sat up and looked at him. “Didn’t you ever have sex in a hurry? Because it felt so . . . urgent?”
Sediba shrugged and stood up to head to the washroom. “Only with people I didn’t know. Anyway,” he paused to look back at me, “I don’t think you want to know about that, do you? Me and other people?”
I didn’t reply. I was curious but I wasn’t sure how much exactly I was willing to hear.
In a moment, there was the sound of the tap water running and the washroom door clicking open.
“Andrew seems nice,” Sediba called out from behind me.
“He’s fine,” I said, “but he talks a lot. Talks about his feelings every day, all the time!”
When I turned around, he was leaning against the wall behind me, still naked as I was.
“What’s wrong with talking about your feelings?” he asked, with a slight frown.
I was annoyed now, not wanting to talk about Andrew. Andrew needn’t be coming into my home now, I didn’t need to feel I was sharing my intimate moment with him.
“It’s not a guy thing?” he asked.
I shook my head. “It’s not something you do, as a guy, no.”
Sediba chuckled. “Not macho?”
It stung, the word macho. It brought back his blue and white scarf and my practicing to sit and stand with my legs apart. I shut my eyes and let the thought slip out.
He said, “He’s your friend. My friends and I tell each other our feelings.”
I looked away from him, pressed my fingers pressing against my eyes. The truth was, I just didn’t know where to begin, talking about such things.
Sediba said, his eyes narrowing: “I like to talk about how I feel.”
When I didn’t respond, he added, “You’re allowed.”
“What?”
“To tell me how you feel.”
When I looked around me I noticed that apart from the clothes there was something else on the floor: food. Sediba had brought bananas, apples, mangoes and some green vegetables: spinach and beetroot bulbs were scattered on my carpet and a cabbage had rolled under the table.
“What’s this?” I said, making my way around the room as I picked them up.
“What’s what?” he said, watching me with a smile.
I held a mango and stroked its smooth skin with my thumb but my eyes didn’t move from his body. “All this. What’s all this?”
“It’s called food. You have none in your house.” His arms were folded, one ankle crossing the other.
“I don’t cook.”
Sediba didn’t move or attempt to cover himself. He looked very comfortable and grew more amused as he watched me getting aroused.
He said, “That’s too bad.”
“What’s too bad?”
“I don’t cook either,” he
said, and then he was saying something else but I couldn’t hear what—I only heard the mango in my hand fall and roll away behind me. Now my hand was in his and he was leading me to the bedroom. “No rushing this time,” he was saying.
Those first few weeks in Durban with Sediba were glorious, peaceful. He would drive down on Saturday evenings, taking Mondays off—even the ones when I was working—and we’d spend hours in bed, sometimes reluctantly venturing out to the beach or a restaurant. Neither of us liked clubs, so we never tried going out at night—we were not interested in being around other people, and I secretly dreaded running into men I’d only known through one-night trysts. He always brought food and we attempted to cooking it together. We burnt potatoes and overcooked the rice; we over-salted the meat and put the wrong spices in our seshebo. I think we made things worse by tasting before serving the food, always adding more salt, more pepper, more oil. Almost every time we couldn’t help but come out with dish after dish that was overcooked or overspiced. It was a mess. But then we sat at the dining table with its two chairs, looking out at the sky, the fading sunset, the multicoloured rooftops, happily eating our mistakes. My flat was filled with smells of cooking, fresh fruit, and another person’s clothes, which I borrowed and wore or buried my nose in when it had been too long between our meetings.
I was more content in that time that I had ever thought possible.
Sediba’s love for Kwaito had prevailed through the years. He would take whatever CD he was listening to out of his car stereo and bring it up to the flat so we could listen to it together while he cleaned and I cooked or he cooked and I cleaned. The thing he loved the most was to turn on a new Arthur, Mdu, or Boom Shaka and get my opinion on them. We were together when TKZee came out with Dlala Mapantsula and he insisted I listen to the song between my shower and getting dressed, as he danced around the room wearing only his boxer shorts, saying: “These guys stand head and shoulders above the rest.”
Even when his visits were short, because I had been working a lot and we only had a few hours before he had to drive back up north, our days felt long and slow. As we got more comfortable with each other, we started talking a little about the sex we had had before we started seeing each other. I was surprised at how honest I could manage to be while still staying mum about the bulk of what I had done, the shame of my past loneliness still a sore memory.
Mostly we spoke about the things we could laugh about.
I told him about sex with a straight guy in Cape Town who kept saying, “Seriously, I’m straight” almost throughout. I told him, “It should have turned me off but it just made me laugh and made want to have more sex with him.”
Sediba would lie on his back, sometimes laughing so much that he’d have to turn over and cough a little bit. He told me, “I once had sex with this guy who wanted me to wear a hat that Basotho wear. He had one in his bedroom that he kept for boys like me, I guess. He had lived in Lesotho for years and had something going on about those hats, told me about all his Basotho lovers. It was so odd. Not sexy at all, I’ll tell you that.”
Other times, when we were more serious, he’d say, “I can’t believe how many people trust me with their secrets—some of them quite disturbing—and I could never say something as simple as, I’m going to Durban to see my boyfriend. They come in and sit in my chair and tell me about their sadness and their hopes and I can’t just say, when I drop the phone, ‘That was my boyfriend.’”
I thought about how my job required people to open up to me about embarrassing things too. The two of us took care of people in our work and they had to trust us but could never find out who we really were.
Except for keeping us secret, everything felt easier. Suddenly knowing that there would be someone waiting for me at home made my days go quicker and I went back to the days of loving medicine, of feeling that I had the skill and patience it required. Because my isiZulu accent was so bad and I constantly mispronounced words when speaking to patients, sometimes I would wait for the nurse to speak for me, to translate for the Motswana doctor. But now I was feeling bolder and speaking my broken and atrocious isiZulu and watching the patient squirm at my attempt—or be amused. I didn’t mind anymore. Sediba, whose father had been born and raised near Durban, spoke isiZulu very well, and he would teach me a few things about my pronunciation, which made me feel less intimidated by the language. Of course when you think that he was teaching me a lovers’ language—words I was never going to use with my patients—you can see why I came to love hearing him speak it. Even the secret of us, in those days, was more delicious than painful.
I had more patience. I was less restless. Even Andrew talking about his days growing up in the United States I happily listened to, and offered my two cents worth. His parents seemed like they had tried, I would tell him, considering the political climate they were raising him in. “No,” I would reassure him, “you don’t have to call yourself Coloured because that’s what someone of your skin colour and hair texture is called here. You can call yourself whatever you want.”
He wanted to call himself black.
Not before or since have I felt happier or more at ease with myself.
Yet there was the nagging feeling of something being wrong at home. My mother phoned more than she ever had before, giving me updates on her days. She would tell me how much money she had made, how her employees had behaved, whether or not her car needed cleaning. Mundane details really, and I only minded a little bit, until she started with how she had gone to the hair salon and chatted with Sediba’s mother, who appreciated how much time he was devoting to her poor, sick sister in Durban. She suggested that Sediba and I spend time together while he was here. “He should have a break from the aunt. Honestly, it must be so difficult for that poor boy to be doing all that work. His mother tells me he buys food to bring every time he goes. He was always such a good boy.”
Sometimes while she was speaking I picked up my remote and turned on the TV, watched it with the volume down. I didn’t like to hear my mother talking about Sediba, and I didn’t enjoy the panic that led to a headache, sweating and nausea every time she suggested I spend more time with who she didn’t know was my lover.
I had always been a rather impressive liar—if lying could be called impressive—but I never did enjoy its violent effects on my body. After some time I was so determined to stay enveloped in my bliss with Sediba that I answered the phone less and less.
I suppose falling in love makes us selfish and oblivious to the rest of the world. I had observed it in other people but never in myself before. Now I forgave everyone I’d ever known their blissful absence while in the cradle of a love affair. I understood.
In those weeks of working hard and then falling happily into the arms of the man in my life at the end of every week, I ignored the first sign that my mother’s world was crumbling.
And then I returned home one rainy Monday afternoon to find myself unceremoniously yanked back into my parents’ lives. I had rushed back to my flat with great anticipation. I was tired, done with the week and anxious to shut everything out. I had planned only to spend the next few hours making love and talking to Sediba. He had spent the day on the road and then seeing his aunt, before coming to take a much-needed nap at my flat.
It was more my mind that was tired—an emotional sort of exhaustion and not so much in my body. Earlier in the day I had lost a patient who had come in stable but whose condition had quickly deteriorated. I hated it when that happened, it unsettled me more than was necessary and reminded me there were parts of my job I had yet to master. I suspect it’s a side effect of always hiding something: you become obsessed with wanting to know what will happen next—you hate surprises. So I preferred feeling that I could almost always make accurate prognoses at my first meetings with my patients.
I found Sediba still asleep—not even startled by the sound of the door closing behind me. He was always a
deep sleeper, something I envied. After hanging up my coat I picked up the newspaper he had been reading, folded it and placed it on the table in front of the sofa. I stroked his forehead with one hand and the fine hairs on his belly with the other—something I liked to do to wake him up. He awoke with a start, pressing his fingers against his eyes.
“You’re back,” he said, taking my hand in his and smiling into my eyes. I kissed him slowly but when I pulled back something about the look on my face brought a slight frown to his. “Bad day?”
I nodded and he made room for me to lie next to him and put my head on his chest.
“This young boy died suddenly. I didn’t expect it . . . ” my voice trailed off as he stroked my arm.
“Eish . . . askies.”
I liked coming home to a spotless house with the windows open and the fresh scent of a distant lemon tree that I knew was outside though I had never seen it.
“Do you want a glass of wine?” he asked and I nodded but when he started to stand up I held onto him a little bit longer before letting him go.
“What did he die of, the boy?”
“I suspect complications from AIDS. He just came in and collapsed. His mother said he hadn’t been doing well for a while, hadn’t left the house, but today he’d been able to walk outside and make his way to the hospital.”
Sediba was standing at my kitchen pouring us both a glass of red wine and listening. I said: “Did you bring that?” and he smiled at me. “I wanted you to try it, my mother loves it.”
I sat up as he handed me my glass and put his own on the table and then sat next to me, heat rising between our touching arms.
“He didn’t look well but he didn’t look like he was about to die. I was surprised . . . I hate being surprised.”
Sediba kissed my cheek gently and said: “Drink your wine.” I obeyed.
“Your mother called.”
My heart raced. “Did you answer?”
He frowned. “No. I didn’t answer. Why? I would have, but I came in just as she was starting to leave a message.”
Such a Lonely, Lovely Road Page 10
