Cruel Crazy Beautiful World

by Troy Blacklaws

  Students and teachers had dared to hiss at the injustice of a teacher being shot down over a jibe. It was not as if Mister Moyo had tossed darts at the image of Mugabe, or had not stood still as Mugabe went by in his Benz convoy. If schoolboys in Bulawayo had learnt one thing, it’s this: in Zimbabwe the law is just a panga blade to cut down Mugabe’s foes.

  The irony is that Mugabe had once been Jabulani’s hero in the chimurenga, the long fight for freedom. Jabulani had spent his boyhood bowing to the White Man in Rhodesia. He was halfway through high school when Mugabe had outfooted that old white Smith. Rhodesia was now Zimbabwe and Salisbury now Harare. And it was in this free Zimbabwe that Jabulani Freedom Moyo had become a human being who held his head up high.

  But then the rumours had begun to bleed out. Of killings in the Ndebele south. Of corpses dumped down an old mineshaft. Of the raping of girls. Of white farmers run off farms that Mugabe then doled out to his mates. Of starving, uprooted farmhands camping in roadside gullies. And, in the end, the jambanja, the chaos of being tossed out, went beyond the farms and you saw the fugitives on the pavements in town holding quavering chickens and skinny goats and peanuts in Castrol cans.

  Teachers had looked up from their newspaper or coffee when Jabulani had gone into the staffroom to empty his pigeonhole. Someone (the rat?) had posted a dry, flat frog in it. Teachers had defied the scowls of the Shona headmaster and stood and tapped their teaspoons against their teacups in a staccato tattoo of camaraderie. For Jabulani they risked their feet being beaten and their heads being submarined by a gang of Mugabe’s goons.

  A student of his had come to his classroom to tell him that he’d learnt a myriad things in his class and that he now wanted to become a writer. He’d learnt how to tune in to the music of words. The boy had hidden his tears behind a hand and Jabulani had hugged him and put a Hemingway in his other hand. A book about a jinxed old fisherman was a curious gift to a boy who might never see the sea.

  As Jabulani put his books and pens into a cardboard box, he had thought Zimbabwe’s hard-earned freedom was just like that giant marlin the old man took so long to reel in. And now it was being ravaged by sharks. But in this case the fisherman did not fend off the sharks that zeroed in on his catch. He too was hacking the fish down to its bare bones. That was what was so warped.

  On the way out of school the headmaster had waylaid him and rifled through the box in Jabulani’s hands to see for himself whether Jabulani was not perhaps pinching a hole-punch or an Oxford dictionary. If Jabulani ran his country’s ruler down there was no telling how low he would go, was the headmaster’s parting shot.

  Jabulani had taught at the school for fourteen years.

  From then on he was a marked man and no school would hire him.

  Hearing his old Datsun blow up one night, he’d run out into the strung-up corpse of the family’s cat.

  They had painted VIVA MUGABE on the walls in cat blood.

  Then he’d landed a job in a bicycle shop called Cheap John’s Cycle Repair. But they had burnt it down and Cheap John had blamed Jabulani for his misfortune. In a town where a synagogue had burnt out less than a year before, the police hardly noted the end of a bicycle shop. That was in June.

  And for half a year now there’d been no meat to go with the half loaf of bread he’d stood in line for each afternoon. For half a year they had survived off the pittance his wife, Thokozile, earned as a nurse. For half a year his son and daughter had stared at him, wondering when he’d pull a rabbit out of the hat to recall the magic of the past.

  Back then he’d come home high on football fever and down a beer on the front step while the cat licked his salty shins. He’d clap his hands as his son Panganai played guitar or beatboxed and his daughter Tendai hula-hooped or cartwheeled. In his pockets he’d have a guitar pick for Panganai and a hairpin for Tendai. And, after another quart or two of beer, he’d flirt with Thokozile, flipping up her skirt to pinch her ass.

  Then he’d lost his post and all the fat and fun of his world had been pared away.

  – You have to run away from that gandanga Mugabe, that murderer, Thokozile had said while rats fidgeted in the roof overhead.

  The rats had got out of hand since the cat died.

  – He will hunt you, that fucking gandanga. And he will kill you. Just as he will kill anyone, Shona or not, who is his foe.

  – How can I go?

  – You have to, otherwise we hunger to the bone. Now, before Christmas, is a good time to go to South Africa. All tourists from overseas go to Cape Town for Christmas holidays and they have money in their pockets. You will find a job and send us money.

  – Where will I stay?

  – Other men find a way. You may be so lucky and find a job in a bar where they put a roof over your head.

  Though she’d cajoled him in this way, she’d never blamed him for the way things had panned out. She’d never reminded him that a dumb, flippant joke of his had cursed them. Though he no longer flirted so cockily, she’d still lured him to her in the dark, telling him he’d always be her man. And after their loving he’d blow cool wind from his lips along the scalp-skin furrows between her cornrows.

  And it was not just her. The holes in Panganai’s Pumas told him he had to go. The faded, let-down hem of Tendai’s school skirt told him he had to go. The empty breadbox told him he had to go. A stone through the kitchen window told him he had to go. The bark of stray dogs as he lay awake at night told him he had to go. Somehow he had to find a life for them beyond this rat-riddled madness of starving and scavenging, of fearing and flinching.

  Yet he was dead scared of heading south.

  He’d heard of the crocodiles and the undertow in the Limpopo.

  He’d heard of border soldiers on the far bank of the Limpopo who’d shoot you and hide your corpse rather than deal with the paperwork to deport you.

  He’d heard of the gumagumas: roving, raping swindlers who lurk in the bundu and hoodwink your money out of you.

  He’d heard of vigilante South African farmers who ride pickups through the borderlands and shoot at stray Zimbabweans. The farmers blame them for the looting and random murders. In the old days the border had been guarded by drafted white-boy soldiers. Now there is no draft in South Africa and the borders are riddled with holes.

  He’s heard from the deported that in a border town called Musina a police captain has photos of dead refugees on file. This girl called Jendaya was raped and stabbed by the gumagumas. They found her with her panties on her head. This boy called Goodwill was robbed and stabbed by the gumagumas. In his pocket was a paper in the hand of his schoolteacher, pleading for pills to cure his mother of the blood in her spit.

  He had no money for the malaishas, the human smugglers (half upfront, half on arrival). He had no friend in Cape Town to shack up with till he found his feet.

  If he survived crocodiles and soldiers, gumagumas and vigilantes, and somehow got a ride to Cape Town, then he’d need to beg for asylum papers from Home Affairs. And until he had papers he’d have to dodge the Nigerians in this place and the Tanzanians in that place, the Gambians here and the Kenyans there. He’d have to skirt the townships where black South Africans blamed dirty Zimbabweans for pinching their jobs and their girls and for dabbling in witchcraft.

  Yet he’s lucky he’s a man, for they may just give him asylum. They give no papers to boys and girls, so they have to survive in limbo. The boys camp under bridges, in roadside culverts and on outskirt dumps of junk and dirt. You see them (if you have eyes to look) in their ratty shorts and tacky flip-flops scavenging in bins, plucking at guitars conjured from paraffin tins, playing football with a dirty tennis ball, dodging motorcars to beg as the robots go from orange to red. Ether from a bottle of glue may send them on blurred, spinning trips. The girls you never see. They morph into maids, wives and whores. Never mermaids.

  An aeroplane hums overhead. Jabulani detours from the path to shinny up an acacia tree.

  His heart still beats har
d long after the humming of the plane fades out.

  Once dark falls he will head further south through this foreign veld pervaded by cackling calls, distant shots and jaggy-tooth things.

  3

  HERMANUS. MIDAFTERNOON.

  The town sulks under a smudged sky, caught between stoic mountains and a grey sea.

  Zero spots a half-hidden white pickup up ahead and his foot rides light on the pedal.

  – Pigs, Zero spits.

  Zero has hated the police since they loaded up the alley-striped, jazz-pervaded world of his boyhood in District Six onto the flatbed of a truck and shifted his family to a matchbox house out on the windswept Cape Flats. He had seen his father go from finger-snapping, nipple-pinching, banjo-strumming charmer to a mumbling ghost within half a year of the bulldozers levelling the jumbled bars and haunts of a jaunty, jiving youth. His father died a muted, bitter death in a randomly wired-off zone out on the dusty Flats.

  Me, I am free to come and go despite being half coloured. Yet I fear for this land where a blood-lusting tsotsi will stab an old man with a flick knife for the pittance in his pocket, where Mbeki (our tea-sipping chief) turns a blind eye to the loco antics of Mugabe just over the border, and where Zuma (Mbeki’s second fiddle) is somehow above the law. There are murmurs in the papers of dodgy arms deals and pocketed money. Yet they can’t catch Zuma out. He’s as elusive as a chameleon that shuffles his camo colours at whim.

  My old man, however, revels in this loophole-riddled time.

  The Benz halts in front of the scuba-diving shop on the seafront road.

  The sea scatters foam like white feathers of shot birds.

  Along the rocks an old man furtively knifes mussels out of cracks.

  A gummy-eyed old hobo herds his reeking, bagged world on a hospital gurney. The gurney’s wheels squeal like cornered rats.

  – You happen to have a fag? Or a bob or two? Either will do.

  Zero fishes a packet of Camels out of the pocket of his half-mast Dockers. He finds a balled ten-rand note in his pocket. He fingers out two smokes.

  The hobo tucks one behind his ear and puts the other between his cracked lips. He fattens out the note, holds it up to squint at the watermark like some wary dealer, then folds it and tucks it behind his hat band.

  Zero rummages in the Benz’s cubbyhole for an old Bic lighter and hands it to the hobo.

  His fag catches fire, then fades to a glow.

  – Ta for the fire.

  Now the hobo studies the orange Bic lighter lying in his red-lined, dirt-rimed hand.

  – It’s yours, chirps Zero.

  The hobo nods ta, and thumbs down the gas to sniff at it.

  Zero fetches a can of oil out of the boot. Then he kills that ratty squealing of the gurney.

  That’s the thing with my old man. Just when you peg him as an asshole, he off-foots you.

  Over the roof of the shop a great white shark gapes its jaw at a dummy in a wetsuit in a diving cage.

  Half of Zero’s left calf is gone from the time a shark took him while he was diving for crayfish. He had gone on diving for years after to prove to his mates that he was no moffie. Nowadays others dive for him ... for the sacks of crayfish traded in alleyways behind pubs. Another of his sideline capers: purveyor of pirated shellfish.

  We lug my guitar and a kit bag (full of bunged-in Levis and rugby jerseys) and banana boxes (full of studied novels with unlined spines, curiously devoid of pencil marks and coffee stains) and Johnnie Walker boxes (full of Zero’s trading goods) up a flight of whining steps.

  On the landing, while I fiddle with the key, he randomly picks up a book from one of the boxes.

  – How the hell can you read a book and not crack the spine? It’s unnatural.

  Again I find this ironic, coming from the man who leaves no spoor. I merely shrug as he flicks through the book.

  In fact I never annotated my textbooks at university. I never inked my name on the flyleaf. I never took notes in lectures. I just tuned in and remembered. I have that kind of mind. I remember things.

  – You think you’re higher than your old man now you’ve read all your books, hey?

  He drops the book.

  – I tell you, life is too short for highfalutin books with long words.

  The door swings open. Light filters through a salt-filmed window into the spartan flat. A smell of dust and flat beer and old record sleeves flows out.

  A sagging bed stands on paint-flecked floorboards. A half-blind mirror hovers over a basin. A rickety bentwood chair lurks under a graffitied desk. A blade fan drops a dirty string. A bare bulb dotted with fly shit dangles at the end of a wire.

  I flick the switch and the bulb flares, illuminating flecks of mosquito blood on the walls.

  Zero tugs the string of the fan. The blades sigh into a blur.

  Through the window I see the new harbour a mile away, across the bay.

  On a random nail I hang a watercolour my mother once did of a seagull in Kalk Bay harbour. I found the painting folded up in a book long after she burnt the others. Long after she put a diamond ring and all her milky opals in a drawer for good.

  Over time my mother traded the company of men for her front-yard gnomes. She loves her gnomes for wanting nothing from her other than the pigeon shit wiped off their glossy red hats. She loves their jolly mouths rimmed in snowy white for being forever amused by her mutterings. They never burp beer fumes at her. Nor do they leer at other women. Mazel tov is all they ever say. Lucky star. Yet the stars have not been kind to her. In their mouths mazel tov is just another way of saying such is life.

  She can’t bear the way Zero licks his fingers to turn the page when he reads the paper, nor his tacky spinal tattoo of a mango-titted virago, nor his habit of flicking fag stubs into her fuchsias, nor the way he foots her Bengal cat aside. While he’s out cruising after dusk she dozes off in front of her murder mysteries with her cat in her lap, never seeing the killer caught. Or she studies the neat hole left in an avocado by the pip, until it begins to tint sepia. Then she spoons it into her mouth, happy that she no longer has to worry about him smearing her lipstick with whisky-fumed lips.

  Phoenix has a theory that my mother’s so hooked on murder mysteries because she gets to vicariously kill Zero over and over again. And that old Zero’s in the dark about this.

  Perhaps Zero and my mother are still tenuously twinned in this knack for never being caught red-handed.

  All the years I studied at university neither my mother nor her opals were rubbed to draw their fire to the surface. She exudes so stoic and islanded an aura that I seldom hold her, the woman who bears the shimmering scars of my unfurling in her womb. The woman whose milk I sucked and who read Alice in Wonderland to me as she tucked me in at night.

  I sigh at not having to witness my mother drift ever further into her wordless, wary, gnomic world. Or to catch her again in the dark on grass all blue with fallen jacaranda flowers, lying fat and naked and deathly white, as if raped by the moon.

  Though Zero’s a dog, I have to confess there’s something of his eye for girls in me. My heart skips a beat when the southeaster flips up the skirt of a stockinged girl. I too have gawped at the copper hips and jiggling moons of the Loop Street go-go girls. And yet my old man’s lip-licking at the sight of a scant skirt renders me somehow ashamed of being a man.

  Am I a man, then? Is a man as scared of the random hop of frogs as I am? Does a man blow kazoooing bubbles through a straw in the lees of a mojito? Does a man cry freely during a film? Does a man just let his mother fade out? Does a man bow to his old man’s plan for him instead of heading out into the world to seek his fortune?

  I feel like a white-clay boy who has been exiled from his mother’s hut to wander ghost-like through the bundu till I become a man. This time now, in this boondocks place, is my bundu time. It may not be hard-core bundu, I may not have to kill things or dig up roots, but it is nevertheless where I’ll have to learn to survive alone. I’d rather just p
lay my guitar and whimsically pen poems, maybe travel to see the world: Galway, Sienna, Malacca, Saigon, Mandalay. Yet I feel I have to undergo this exile if I am ever to free myself from my old man.

  A hidden gecko chirps at this daunting thought.

  Zero listlessly plucks a few strings of my guitar. You can hear that the feeling for it is still in his fingers though he hasn’t played his guitar for years, ever since the thing that can never be undone happened.

  I fling the window ajar. I look out over the sweep of Walker Bay. I smell a fusion of salt and rotting kelp and seagull guano. Feathery wave froth fuses with white sky.

  The world lies under a skin of dust. Sounds warp as if played on a tape left too long in the sun. Wind gusts off the sea, chucking scraps of paper about.

  I pick up a flyer advertising pizza.

  Two gaunt black dogs hide from the wind in a capsized forty-gallon drum in a corner of the empty market square. They curl floppy pink lips to flash their canines at us.

  Zero squints at a flapping map of the market layout to find his bearings.

  The dogs eye us through lacklustre eyes.

  There is the Burgundy restaurant on the west of the square. The Fisherman’s Cottage pub is behind him, so my stall (he figures out) is to be just in front of this low white wall. Under this kaffir plum, right here.

  He folds the map away and Zippos a Camel in the lee of his hand.

  I look at the space that is to become my world. The measure of a jail cell. In the shade of this kaffir plum I am to sell bead animals made by wizard-fingered Zimbabweans in Cape Town while fellow refugees hold their place in the never-ending line for asylum papers.

  – The bead animals will sell like hotcakes. The good beadwork is done by the Zimbabweans, or the Zulus.

  He flicks ash to the wind.

  – If you want carvings, that is another thing.

  He jabs his fag towards me to underscore his teaching.

  Curiously, for one who is neither black nor white, Zero loves to pigeonhole folk. If you want masks you find a Gambian. If you want a sarong you find a Kenyan. If you want carvings you find a Tanzanian. If you want dope you find a Nigerian who will just happen to know a man who has carted his taboo cargo down from Lesotho’s skylands, Sherpa style.