“Still unmarried.”
Sediba would know I was around before I saw him.
Bra Chilly spotted me from the back of the shop where he was giving orders. He raised his hand, signaling me to come around to the back. I nodded and went past the line towards him. An older woman yelled: “Haai, wena! We were here first.”
Bra Chilly retorted, “Heh, Mma! This is doctor Mosala. He’s the man taking care of your cousin over there while you stand here. Let’s help him get back to work.”
I heard the woman suck her teeth and mumble some profanity that I chose not to hear. I was embarrassed by Bra Chilly’s special treatment but also a little pleased to feel so at home here. He shook my hand as always, asked how I was doing without my parents, and said how much he missed both of them, how my mother loved for him to bring her a special dish of Morning Meal every Friday.
“Every Friday, I ran over. I brought it over myself. Just me. I never sent anyone else.” I nodded with a big smile. I had known my mother’s love for spicy food very well. He worked as he spoke, preparing my morning meal and pap, remembering what I used to order. I was in the mood for bread but was so touched at entering a place where they believed they knew what I liked to eat that I didn’t dare correct him.
I paid him a little extra before walking out into the sun, going to the Pick ’n Pay for the surgery supplies. Coming out of Pick ‘n Pay I walked towards the salon. At the door I saw his mother walking a customer out—a woman about her age. I knew that it would be terribly rude of me to wave and not go over, so I crossed the courtyard and headed towards her. As I approached her I saw that Sediba was inside, shaving a young guy’s head. I smiled politely at his mother, feeling genuinely happy to see her. She exclaimed, “Ao, bathong! Kabi!” and put her arms around me. Returning her embrace, I looked over at Sediba holding his clippers midair, looking at me with surprise.
My eyes turned now to his mother who held my hand and asked, “How are you, really, my child?” She was truly the bearer of her name. Everything about her was gentle and calm. She didn’t let go of my hand from the moment we started talking to the moment that I told her I had to run.
“I must get back to work, I’m sure they’re waiting,” I told her as I started to go.
“Yes, yes! I heard you’re so busy. I’m happy you’re back, my child. Truly. We need you here.”
She gave no sign of knowing about Sediba and me except for a brief glance at Sediba to see his reaction when I waved to him.
I said, “Heita!” like I was speaking to a casual acquaintance, before running off.
In my car I put my head on my steering wheel for a minute to compose myself before starting. I had wanted to go and ask how he was. I had liked seeing him at work—as I had never done before. The place was beautiful, I wanted to say. It had him written all over it: clean, white walls, long and large black mirrors. I had only ever heard about it from him.
I missed him more in that minute in the car than I had ever thought was possible.
But I had to go. I was going to have to learn to live without him because he was getting married and it was not to me. I would have to learn, at some point, not to create opportunities to get a glimpse of him.
At the end of that day I told Neo not to wait for me, that I would lock the doors after she left. I sat at my desk going over the day: it had been painful to see Base. He said that he had ignored “it,” meaning the symptoms he had seen. “A girl I was seeing phoned to tell me she had had it two years ago. Said I should get tested. I had had sex with her so many times that I didn’t even think it was possible that I would not have it. You know how we are, Jo. Skin to skin. I got this fever even before she died. I knew what was happening but I kept saying: Not me. I’ll beat this. I’ll be the one to beat it.’”
Then, he said, he couldn’t bring himself to accept that he was dying.
“And then that day when you came back I saw you see me. I saw you see it. After that I’ve just been thinking it was time I spoke to you. Anyway . . . ”
He’d been exhausted by the effort that the day had required: getting up and dressed, walking over to the surgery and speaking to me. In Durban when people had AIDS I couldn’t picture who they had been before I met them. Now I saw the younger, more robust and athletic Base kicking a ball with the force of a bull. I saw us running behind a house and hearing his thunderous voice count to ten before coming to find us. I barely recognized the rapidly aging, fading man in my office.
I sat thinking about going to find Sediba and regretted that I had not gone over to say a proper hello. It was childish and I knew it would irritate him, but it had been awkward to do anything more than give a passing greeting because I felt his mother watching me and I wondered if anyone else in the salon knew about us. I had been silly, and it was just the kind of behaviour that he detested. Still, I was a little bit pleased at the thought of him possibly being angry with me. I wanted to make him feel something that would maybe lead to an exchange between us. He seemed to have given up sending me phone messages.
I was sitting there mulling over this, when the door to my office swung open.
Sediba stood against the doorframe with a confused look on his face.
“So we’re really not speaking now? You come by my work and you can’t even speak to me?”
I feigned nonchalance and reclined in my chair.
“I just went to get some food, I didn’t have time to stop by and chat.”
He was about to say something but then his expression changed as he decided against it. He shut his eyes and sighed.
I said, “Do you want to sit down? You look tired.”
He smiled. “Come with me. I left my car at work. We can walk.”
I felt that familiar jolt of pleasure but I pretended to be confused instead.
“You walked all the way from the salon?”
“No. I got a lift. Come with me.” He had his arm stretched out towards me like he was waiting for me to take his hand, only I was too far across the room.
“Where are we going?”
“Let’s have a beer at my house. We’ll sit in the backyard and talk, because we really should, and I promise not to try anything.”
I laughed at the personal joke. “OK,” I said. The thought of being in his backyard was like the thought of guava ice block in the heat of December. I would have done anything for it. I stood up and walked towards the door, peeling my coat off. “Come in a little, I have to hang this behind the door,” I told him. I could smell the triple X mints on his breath as he came closer and I hung my coat behind the door and picked up my bag. I chewed on my lower lip as I put the stethoscope in the bag, trying to stop myself from pulling him to me. He stood really close, so that I had the idea he knew what he was doing. He knew the effect he still had on me.
It made me wonder if he had seen me and panicked, thinking that the quick wave I had given him that afternoon would from now on be the extent of our exchanges. I moved quickly across the door and he followed me through the surgery, going out into the fading afternoon light. We had never walked together before—not in the township. We had never been seen together, since we used to come find each other in our backyards, in the dark.
I stopped to lock the doors. We had three keys for three locks. I said something inane like, “You have to be so careful with the medicines in there.” We locked it behind us. I think we both realized what was happening because we stood, hands in our pockets, staring at each other like teammates about to go out on the field for the final, crucial minutes of a big game. We laughed at each other’s expressions.
“You could have driven,” I said.
He nodded. “But I think we should do this.”
It was a sentence with layers of meaning and I think we were both slightly terrified at what it meant. His house was not far—only about five minutes—but now it suddenly fel
t like we were about to trek all the way across the world.
To get to Sediba’s house you had to turn left from the surgery and go from the fifty fours down towards the lower forties and into the higher thirties. The way there was also a straight line. But if we did that we would walk past Lelo’s house, where he was sure to be standing outside watering his garden or chatting to a neighbour.
“Which way?” Sediba asked. I pointed towards the other road, circuitous to be sure, but he nodded right away. We started walking.
We went onto the newly paved road, occasionally stepping onto the dusty sides to avoid a car. I remembered that first evening in Durban when he had come to fetch me for our first date; how nervous and excited I had been and how quickly we had gone into conversation about home.
I said, “Your salon looks nice,” and he smiled back at me. “Thanks Jo. I like how it turned out.”
He looked my way now, hands still in his pockets, and asked, “How have you been?”
“It’s been a hard day,” I said. “I suspect I’ll have many more of those.”
“Base told me he was coming to see you.”
It was tricky, working in a place where you knew everyone personally. My father had managed merely through having a quiet demeanour. He didn’t have a lot of friends so I think speaking of his patients was never a problem. I had wondered what I would say about Base to Sediba and thought it best to be quiet, but now that he had brought it up, it seemed easier to just talk about it.
I said, “Eish, Jo,” and shook my head.
“I know. I think we’ve all pretended it wasn’t happening until now. He’s been saying he’s going to see you since you came back, so finally today he came.”
“It’s a lot of people. It’s going to be a long road.”
“People can’t admit it and when they do, it’s too late,” he said. We were standing at the main road now, waiting at the stop sign. You had to be careful at township stop crossings because most drivers took a stop sign as a mere suggestion and not a hard and fast rule. It was also rush hour for taxis. When we finally crossed, we were on a dusty road, in Block A. The houses here were of less affluent families than the ones on Block B. Many immigrant workers lived here in rows of rented tin houses. I vaguely remembered Aus’ Tselane leaving our house to come and live here with people who were from the same village as hers, but that had been so long ago that it was a passing memory.
“Even if people acknowledged it, at this time the medicine is not readily available. It’s not affordable.”
He nodded, listening attentively the way he always could.
“You asked me once why I was not angry about us—about the things we couldn’t do. I think I’m always feeling furious about things having to do with my work, about this. People dying here when there are places in the world where medicine is more affordable. I reserve my anger for that, I suppose.”
“But that doesn’t mean you’re not angry about the things we can’t do.” He was looking up, at the cloudless sky.
“No. It doesn’t. It’s just that I think I can do something about people being sick. But I can’t do much about people hating who I am, making jokes about it, casting me out.”
“But last time you were saying . . . it was like you decided you could do something.”
I thought back to the last time I had been in his house.
“Isn’t that what you were saying?”
A woman with a load of brooms balanced on her head walked past us, her toes poking holes through her shoes. We turned left towards a large and ornately decorated building, the location’s only Catholic Church. We passed a wall with a crucifix. Jesus was the colour of dry desert sand, below the large silver bell.
“I was saying let’s try. I wasn’t saying people will accept it.”
He looked at me and then ahead at the road, like he was separating one thing from the other, trying to understand me.
I said, “But you were saying ‘no’, so . . . ”
“You know, Kabz. It’s just not the kind of thing you can do alone around here. I mean, when we were in Durban, I wanted you to come back and I wanted to think we could do it. Together, maybe. But alone, once I came back here and I knew you were staying in Durban, I just couldn’t.”
We crossed the main road again and Mma Mathibe was standing at her gate. I’ve always had the idea that if anyone saw me next to Sediba they would immediately know that I loved him. It sent me into a panic several times when we walked together in Durban, because I thought we might be attacked, but we had been lucky. Now I looked at Mma Mathibe and imagined that I saw us through her eyes.
She waved us over and we walked to her. She said: “Kabi, my child. My back is killing me. Why don’t you come in tomorrow after work and take a look?”
I nodded and said that I would.
“I finished my medicine—the one your father had given me. I’m finished. Come with some of it, please? It used to help me a lot. Now you see how I’m standing?”
She was leaning against her gate and I could see that her weight was fully on it. She looked at Sediba and said, “Ao, Diba but you are so handsome! I never see you. My granddaughter is always saying: I’m going to Sediba, I’m going to Sediba. I hear you are so busy!”
Sediba smiled and said, “I am.”
“And, mara you are helping your mother. You know, you are a good boy. Truly. Children who help their parents, neh? You really are good boys. I wish your father were here to see you, Kabi” She took out a handkerchief and dabbed the corners of her eyes.
We were nodding and saying: “Yes, Mma,” until she turned and started walking towards her house, her hands on her lower back.
“Let me go and check on the rice, my children. It shouldn’t burn.”
Further down two young girls still wearing their school uniform greeted Sediba with broad grins. “Sedibaaaa,” they sang.
We crossed another street and we were closer to his house, when someone called him from behind. It was a young woman I had never seen before. She had her dreadlocks in a neat bun on her head and was waving wildly at us.
“Sediba! Sediba! Thank you so much!”
“How did it go?” he called back at her.
She held up two thumbs and he smiled and waved back.
“How did what go?” I asked.
“She had a job interview and came to fix her locks. She was nervous about her hair looking professional.”
We walked into his house and I put my bag down on the first chair at the table. He went to take two beers out of the fridge, but as soon as he handed me one his phone rang. He went to answer it.
I took my shoes off and rolled up my pants, then stepped out onto the backyard. The grass was soft against my feet, the beer cold in my hand. I looked up at the swaying branches, leaves rustling in the cooling breeze. This house felt like a home to me. Every time I had been here I had wanted to stay.
I walked back and forth between the trees, savouring the feeling of the soft grass on my bare soles. I sensed that Sediba was standing at the window, watching me, resisting coming out.
It was hard to get used to the idea of leaving here, going back to the strange and empty house up on the hill. It was harder still to get used to being with Sediba and not be close to him, walk into his bedroom like it was mine.
I think we were both dreading the end of our time together. The walk had felt easy, comfortable and even somewhat sensuous. The proximity of our bodies, going back to speaking the way we always had, and resisting the temptation to touch was like another time. But now I went in because it was getting darker, and he was not coming outside, and I couldn’t put it off any longer.
He was standing at the kitchen sink when I walked back in, his hands in his pockets. I stood near the door, thinking I’d put on my shoes but not quite able to. Then suddenly I
started to tell him about Sizwe. I had been meaning to do this for so long that when I started, the words came flowing out of me. I wanted desperately for him to know where I had been while we were apart. He listened, nodding, understanding.
“Something about the way he looked at me,” I told him. “Just something about him. Like he knew about me and he was fine with it.”
“Are you fine with it?” Sediba asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Who you are, who you want to be with. Are you fine with it now?”
I didn’t speak.
I left my shoes at the door and came up to him. “I’m fine with it.”
“Because your parents aren’t here.”
“Because I want more than this. I want more than hiding and lying and going home alone staring at the walls. I want you.”
“I still want—”
“I know, Diba. I know. A life. A house, a child. Marriage. I know.”
He shut his eyes. “Kabza . . . I miss you. I miss us, Durban. I miss you. Every day.”
I stepped forward, slipped my hands under his t-shirt and put both my palms on his stomach, feeling his rigid muscles.
He took my face in his hands and I tasted sweets on his warm breath.
It was like finally coming home. A slow kind of lovemaking, reminiscent of our lazy, easy, blissful Durban days. My body made sense again. All of me made sense again.
I now understand this about loving and being loved: it’s the making sense that’s the point. It’s not the weak knees and the times you can’t get someone off your mind. It’s when the life you live makes sense, feels whole, that’s the point.
In the night, in his bedroom, I felt at first like I had swum to shore and then later, when he was asleep, terrified that this might be the last time. His breathing had fallen into a slow and steady rhythm but my body would not settle down. I sat up and swung both my feet onto the floor and faced the open windows. There was a street light just outside that was so bright that it faded the night and made the place feel like it was still engulfed in daylight. These lights were all over the township, meant to deter thieves and robbers. I thought about how sometimes the township makes every man feel like a criminal.
Such a Lonely, Lovely Road Page 22
