Cruel Crazy Beautiful World

by Troy Blacklaws

  He draws in air and blinks his eyes rapidly.

  – Then one day the factory men, they came to our hut in a pickup. They dragged my mother howling out. They shot guns at the sky. My father, he hopped after them on his good foot, shaking his stick at them. One of the factory men then shot at the sand by his feet and my father, he did this jerky dance. The factory men, they laughed like hyenas.

  – That’s fucked up.

  – When they had gone my father, he fell over and rubbed sand on his head.

  – Was there nothing your father could do?

  – He went to the police. They told him they would put him in jail if he made mischief. He went to the factory and the guards beat him with sticks. After that he just sat on the sand by his dhow and looked out over the lake. If the sky above was pink with flamingos, if a neighbour put a bowl of sour beer down for him, if young girls skipped over a rope tied to the mast of his dhow, he would just go on looking ahead of him. In the end my hope for him was torn as the sail of his dhow.

  I picture a worn-out sail flapping on a loose boom.

  – And your mother?

  – After half a year the factory men, they offloaded her. Her hair was gone and her dress hung loose. My father, he would not let her into his hut. He said he was no longer a man and so he had no wife. She camped in the dhow on the sand. I lay with her. She begged me to go south. In South Africa, she said, there is gold under the sand. And diamonds. And when the wind blows, oranges and avocados fall and rot in the sun. In South Africa the seas are full of fish. They chuck the fish heads along with the guts to the birds. In South Africa the white men throw out the feet of a chicken. In South Africa men may not shoot their guns at the sky and snatch girls who catch their eye. The law forbids it. And if you have this thing I have, she said, they give you medicine so you can survive to see your son finish school. So I told her I will go to this land of gold and oranges and find medicine for her.

  – How’d you survive the long trek?

  – I hid in holes, cracks and empty shacks. I ate insects, worms and rats. Whatever I could catch. In Zambia one time a stray dog followed me for two days. In the end I picked up a stone and put it in my bag. I climbed a tree and waited. In the end that dog, he got too curious and came to sniff the air and looked up at me. I let the stone go. He fell over. I came down and hit him on the head with that stone until his feet no longer kicked. I was hungry and wanted to cut him up, but I was scared of the evil in him. And in Zimbabwe on the border crazy guys called gumagumas hunted me. I hid in an empty warthog hole and prayed to Jesus, for he too came out of the hole they put him in.

  22

  A HOSPITAL SOMEWHERE SOUTH of Bloemfontein.

  The nurse had put a tray down, across Jabulani’s lap. Under the teacup he finds a wisp of paper torn from the margin of a newspaper.

  Hey Dude. I begged a nurse to hand this to you. I’m @ motel as you head out of town. Room 9. Kombi’s out back. If you want a ride, catch me by sundown. Jake

  Jabulani hops out of bed and lets his hospital frock fall. He tugs on his jeans and shirt. He snatches frog-green rubber hospital clogs.

  From the window he lets the clogs fall two floors. They skip off the hard tarmac of the parking lot, then land toe to toe. Jabulani interprets this as a good omen. He slides out over the sill. He holds onto the window frame with his good hand till he hears a shot from somewhere in the hospital. He falls.

  Pain knifes up through his shins and he flips over on the tar like that pangaed woman tossed from a pickup by Mugabe’s monkeys. Blood filters through the white cloth on his hand.

  He hears another shot. The black policeman at the door will have gone down.

  He picks up the clogs and darts barefoot across the lot. At the far end he hides behind a parked taxivan, gulping air and feeling the clogs on to his feet while he scans the hospital through the tinted glass of the taxivan. Amazingly a taximan is dozing at the wheel while Lucky Dube howls from the radio. Jabulani sees Ghost Cowboy at the window of his hospital room, panning his hawk eyes across the lot.

  Then the barrel of a gun is at Ghost Cowboy’s eye and a bullet skips off the roof of the van.

  The taximan shoots out of the van like a fat seed popped from a pod and, lying as flat as his beer gut will let him, calls out to God: Tixo! Tixo!

  The sight is so comical Jabulani laughs a knee-jerk laugh.

  The next shot scatters glass.

  A siren joins Lucky Dube in a jarring duet. Ghost Cowboy vanishes from the window.

  Jabulani dances over glass diamonds in his hospital clogs. A shard of glass spikes through the rubber into his sole-skin. Pain flares through his jinxed left foot. He gimps along on the other foot as he plucks out the glass.

  Then he’s out of the lot and hop-jogging down the road, past a hotel where a dun man studies a fly drowning in his beer, sidestepping an old grandpa who is spitting blood into his hanky, hurdling the cardboard box of a pink-turbanned fruit seller who sells avocados, dodging a dog that clacks his teeth at his heels and an old woman who jousts her walking stick at him and yells: Bliksem! Hoodlum! Catch him!

  Now he’s running full speed on a volatile high of pain and fear. He topples a cart, sending oranges rolling across the tarmac. He outruns a black priest in black garb on a bicycle who calmly doffs his hat to him as if this is a common sight: a man hurtling by at full tilt, casting haunted eyes behind him.

  At the motel he raps on the door to room No. 9. A maid eyes him skewly.

  He gasps wordlessly.

  She snatches up her mop in case he goes for her.

  Jake swings the door open. There’s a fake tiger skin on the wall and a porn video on the TV. A girl’s riding a white horse bareback on the beach. She has zilch on. Just tits bobbing to a Bonanza kind of rhythm and red hair flowing like a river.

  Jake hands Jabulani a half-jack of cheap whisky.

  Jabulani shakes a dose of whisky over his bleeding foot. It stings like blazes. Then he swigs a shot to dull the throbbing in his hand and slow the spinning of his head.

  – That Cowboy’s after me again.

  – Let’s go, Freedom, my man.

  They don’t even wave goodbye to the naked rider.

  Outside the door the maid swings her mop up again. They go through a gap to the back where the VW hobnobs with a rusting, bleeding Dodge up on bricks. A cat jumps out of the Dodge, spooking Jabulani and Jake.

  – You take the Dodge, Jake jokes.

  Jabulani is gobsmacked by Jake’s cool. But then he did not see that Zimbabwean shotgunned down in cold blood. Nor Nina rag-dolling.

  23

  HERMANUS MARKET.

  Buyu’s all natty in his plaid Oakley shorts and Quiksilver T-shirt.

  I teach him how to hang up the seahorses and whales and how to lay out the animals (geckos in front and giraffes behind). I put them in rows: birds of a feather.

  He jumbles them up, subverting all sense of scale.

  I teach him how much each goes for and how much leeway he has for haggling.

  He tells me if I just sit and hope folk will walk up to the stall, I will die a poor man. He heads off with a penguin in one hand and a gecko in the other.

  There’s a pungent tang of sea in the wind. Pink-footed pigeons bob and coo on the zinc roof of the Fisherman’s Cottage.

  And the same unflinching sun fades the tarps and umbrellas cast over the stalls and peels the paint off bone-toned walls. And the same fruit seller calls his unvarying shrill litany.

  The dreadlock dude sways listlessly as a jaded go-go girl as he juggles his devil sticks.

  And Hunter whistles tunelessly as she shines her tiger’s eyes, moonstones, ambers and fossils with the same dazed look in her eyes.

  Beyond her the man from Senegal barters with a tourist who hovers over him as he paints his cast of two-foot-high characters.

  I love this raw, haphazard poetry of the market. Each stall a stanza: measured out and lone-standing yet somehow overlapping and running on. I won
der how I spent years in the muted, stale time-warp of a library while all along life ...

  A whistled chirp from Hunter cuts this thought short. I focus to see the glass-eyed priest slope up to my stall.

  I am scared he’ll wonder how I got scratched up and so discover I dinged his Vespa.

  But he just dandles a gecko unhandily, as if in a daze.

  – My dog’s gone. Something’s happened to him.

  Hunter abandons her stone-rubbing to tune in.

  – He wanders down the road, but he’s never strayed for long. If he’d got run over, I’d have found him. It’s a mystery.

  – Maybe he smelt a bitch and lost his head, chirps Hunter.

  The priest coughs a curt laugh.

  – He’s seventy-seven in dog years. For him and his master, the days of courting girls are long gone.

  Hunter sighs. She shuffles over, holding out a quartz to him.

  – Ever seen a wisp of smoke forever captured in hard water?

  He peers into the quartz as if looking for evidence of God.

  – You may think I’m mad ... but I think they thought he was a stray. And I think someone’s hunting the street dogs in this town.

  I want to laugh, but I see he’s not joking.

  – They all used to beg for fish guts at the new harbour... but now you hardly ever see them.

  I realise that I’ve not seen the pariah market dogs since the afternoon Zero dropped me off.

  – They took him. That’s my theory.

  In a bid to be breezy, I joke:

  – Why would they? This isn’t Vietnam. Or China.

  But Hunter sabos my shot at breeziness:

  – Maybe they inject them with heroin in the townships to see how pure it is before shooting up.

  The priest sways as if he’s on the verge of keeling over.

  – Or that Chinaman Foo Buck Koon turns them into soy-doused take-away?

  I glare at her for being too glib. Yet the priest hardly hears her.

  – I heard there’s a demand for killer dogs in Johannesburg, he says in a wavering voice. He’s got guts. I’ve seen him kill a porcupine.

  I dare not tell him his deaf, spent dog would be hopeless as a guard dog.

  – Maybe witch doctors want him for their voodoo muti, Hunter pipes up again.

  God fops out of the priest’s mouth like a spat-out fish.

  Hunter’s in a groove:

  – They turn their bones into a kind of snuff. Or scientists caught him. They don’t just shoot dogs into space, they use them as guinea pigs to find a cure for malaria and yellow fever.

  Again the priest says God.

  Instead of soothing him Hunter reels off her cryptic mantra:

  – Things can get hazardous.

  I turn to the priest.

  – Hey, I’ll keep an eye out for him.

  At that moment the harbour hobo heads for his fig tree, cup in hand. He slides his spine down the bark. Moonfleet folds at his feet.

  The priest gazes glumly at the dog.

  – Dogs all over this country. Why’d they snatch mine?

  Tears bead down his cheek till his stubble pops them. He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand.

  – Let me make you a sweet cup of tea, coos Hunter.

  She taps hot water from a flask into a cup and drops a used tea bag into it.

  – He loved haring after seagulls on the beach. He’d skip through the waves after a tennis ball. He was plucky. Now I have no one to play my piano for.

  An old, one-eyed priest playing the piano for a deaf dog. A woman murmuring to dumb garden gnomes. Another lamenting a lost beauty to dead stones. A muezzin’s cry falling on deaf ears. Rocking men reeling off prayers to a god who turned a blind eye last time.

  Hunter teaspoons Peel’s honey into his tea, stirs it, then hands it to him. As he slips a finger through the ear of the teacup, she runs her fingers along his hand.

  Just then Buyu jogs up, waving a fistful of notes at me.

  – You see!

  – I see.

  – I got double what you wanted for the things. Double!

  – But that’s unethical.

  Buyu laughs his white-white teeth at me.

  – They went smiling away.

  I tell the priest this is Buyu, who walked all the way from Tanzania.

  – I see you two have been in the wars.

  As a red herring I sing out:

  – Buyu and I will find out what happened to your dog. Hey, Buyu?

  Buyu flicks me a mock salute.

  – That’s kind of you. Goodbye, Jerusalem. Goodbye, Buyu. And thank you for the tea, ma’am.

  – Call me Lily, Hunter says.

  – Lily. A beautiful name, he says as he goes.

  Lily zero-mindedly shines the teacup with her rubbing cloth.

  – How do we find a dog, Buyu?

  He frowns as if figuring out a hard sum. Then his eyes spark.

  – We go to the boys!

  – Hey?

  – The bus boys! They know every alleyway, every kitchen courtyard, every dustbin with no lid on. They have learnt to think like dogs.

  – Cool.

  – We’ll get them Kentucky, hey?

  Just then the whale crier’s kelp horn sounds.

  – The world’s gone haywire, says Hunter. The whales used to head south again for the Antarctic by the end of September. Then a few calving mothers stayed over Christmas. And now the dogs are vanishing.

  – You think there’s a plot?

  – Something’s awry. It may not be human.

  – You mean black magic?

  – I told you, things can get hazardous. Anything can happen.

  I wonder if my mother can stop falling further out of focus. I wonder if Buyu and I can find the priest’s dog. Most of all, I wonder if Lotte can happen and how on earth I am to woo her shadowed by a ragtag boy and fairy-godmothered by a seller of fossils.

  Shadows of seagulls drift and dart over the market floor.

  A breeze sweeps along dust and longing.

  24

  CAPE TOWN. DUSK.

  The fabled flat-spined mountain is a giant stone dragon rimmed with an orange haze.

  Jake’s Kombi heads past the harbour of cranes and ship funnels and yacht masts jousting haphazardly. Sea tang, dockyard din and gull yells gust in through the wound-down windows. And out flow the jiving tones of Bafo Bafo at full volume.

  Sails drift to and fro on the sea. Jabulani’s eyes are agape at the wonder of this duned, inverted sky.

  And that flipped copper coin gone all verdigris is Robben Island, where they jailed Mandela for so long.

  They hum along Strand Street, under tall palms dancing in the wind. Barefoot street boys laugh and whistle at the crazy-coloured Kombi singing by.

  At robots they are hustled by boys jockeying to hawk things crafted from wire and men yelling the headlines or wanting to wipe dust-filmed windows.

  Jabulani sees a white man begging amid diesel fumes and dud dreams.

  Now zero on this earth can amaze Jabulani.

  He feels lucky to ride high – however fleetingly – in a world where folk are begging, burning out, being shot at.

  In Sea Point Jake finds a free bay on the seafront. They pick up fish and chips from a van and a few beers from a bottle store. They dodge skaters and joggers on the seafront path and hop over the railings and perch on rocks rimed with salt and seagull guano. Jabulani slides his good foot out of a rubber hospital clog and into the cool of a rock pool. Seagulls bicker and beg for chips. Jabulani’s beer can tips and beer froths out over the rocks like sea foam. He thinks of the blood spilt so he has the freedom to sit cooling his feet and filling his gut: Poor Othello. Poor Nina. That man in the kiosk? The policeman in the hospital?

  Jabulani reads the news his fish and chips is wrapped in:

  Nigerian pub ransacked

  ‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ This has become the war cry of the young men roving the town
ships, armed to the teeth with hoes, stones and guns. Their mission is to root out foreigners, to loot their shacks, to rape their women. The targeted come from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Congo and beyond. Such foreigners, often in the country without a visa, are accused of taking locals’ jobs. It seems that apartheid is far from dead. It has resurfaced as xenophobia: the fear of foreigners. Police are slow to deal with attacks such as this one on an unlicensed Nigerian-run pub in Langa.

  A police captain said: ‘Illegal foreigners have a penchant for crime. They don’t pay tax and they try to be clever by producing fake papers.’

  The Nigerian pub keeper, who was formerly a journalist in Lagos, said: ‘I came to South Africa to escape persecution. I never thought this would happen in the country of Mandela.’

  In downtown Cape Town, Bishop Tutu called for calm.

  The sea flings white foam at the sky and the foam sticks like wet paper to form clouds.

  Jabulani thinks of how this cockroachy thing called racism will always survive, somehow, in one form or another. He fears this rancour towards African foreigners they call makwerekwere ... towards him: job-pincher, tax-dodger, would-be thief and paper-faker. The fear of this racist venom is as biting as the bullet wound in his hand. He shakes his head and focuses on the waves.

  Their mad, macho fervour followed by a sighing, ebbing lull echoes the universal rhythm of wanting and sating. For now his hunger is stilled, but he wants an end to the throb of pain in his hand. And he has other wants. He wants to love his wife under a free sky. He wants to go on holiday to the seaside with Panganai and Tendai, for them to see this vista of shifting blue dunes and a diving sun. He wants to teach again, in a world where headmasters are not puppets of evil men and where boys and girls have the freedom to question the things they are taught. And where will a man find such a world if outsiders are hunted and shops burnt in this paradise called Cape Town?

  Perhaps there’s a place overseas somewhere where a man may live out his life fearlessly. But perhaps there, where they have no fear of guns and stones and evil men, they learn to fear other things.