Jabulani and Canada Dry chuck a tennis ball to each other over the surface of the river. They dive and whoop like schoolboys until they both lie winded and worn out on the sand.
Jabulani rewinds the call he put through to Bulawayo from Zero’s telephone. He had to beg folk from over the road to call Thokozile. Their telephone had been cut off long ago. He’d heard them call her name. And then he’d heard her panting in his ear and he’d imagined her breath hot as a dog’s on his skin. And he did not tell her about the marijuana farm or his being shot or about a falling monkey-gobbler. All he said was that he was in Cape Town and that it was beautiful beyond words and that he’d found a way to earn money doing odd jobs and would wire money for Christmas. She’d sobbed and he’d told her he loved her, that she was never out of his mind, and he’d vowed he’d come for them soon. He’d been stoic until he put the telephone down. And then he’d gone out in the dark and climbed down into the empty pool. He’d lain face flat on the pool floor. He’d felt the memory of the sun seep into his skin. He’d heard the dogs of the hood bark their tom-tom poetry at the moon. He’d felt his ribs would snap with the soul pain that bore down on him, splaying his feet and hands out. To bats hunting lamp-dazzled moths, he may have looked like a skydiver falling through a faded blue sky.
And the sandpapery tongue of a Bengal cat licking dry salt from his face had lured him to lift his eyes to the sight of Miriam dancing alone under the moon. Curiously, it felt like so long ago, like a déjà vu from another lifetime.
And now the falling sun is a flaming, tacky pink, just like the end of a cowboy flick.
37
HERMANUS.
Time blurs on her cool, white floor. A sketchy, sepia light is cast through the fat fingers of the cut frangipani. The sea, wind-warped, sings in my ears.
I felt guilty sending Buyu alone to the flat. But if he survived gumagumas and rabid dogs, then the path was not too risky: just a crabby professor and snakes to dodge.
He was all sparky in the market all day, hustling and skipping while I sipped sour black coffee.
Now, as my eyes pan along her paintings, they turn into film shots:
Drops of blood, spat like viscous Tabasco from the eyes of a mermaid onto her breasts, travel down towards her belly button. But before they arrive a stray dog laps them up off her skin.
White pigeons fly out of a pussy (her?) and a fantasy animal (half hyena, half Tasmanian devil?) bares jagged fangs and catches them out of the sky with a long, lurid tongue.
A vulture dips its head into the carcass of a seal and bobs up all red-skulled and gleeful.
A shark glides below an unwitting, wingless girl swimming on the surface of a lagoon ...
I avert my eyes to focus on her. I want to lose myself in her the way I got lost in the mind of García Márquez. I put my ear to the lee of her hipbone and hear bubbles gurgle below her skin. My cock goes hard as cuttlebone. I swivel her and hold her heels high. Her nude love-flower lurks shyly between folded petals. I kiss this flower until it blooms to fill out my palm.
I let her heels go and her knees fall akimbo to flare a hint of pink.
Just her, her bizarre paintings and a dying frangipani. No dog or cat. No flowers.
– How come you stay here all alone?
– My mother died a few years ago. My father’s away. He’s a professor at a university in New York. I see him during his long summer holidays. We go for long walks along the path and go to Quayside Cabin for whitebait. And Al I see on weekends. I’m not too lonely in between.
I skirt away from the topic of Al.
– And no flowers or cats?
– I want the freedom to walk out without anything dying. Sometimes I go to Cape Town for a few days on a whim and stay at in my father’s flat in Hout Bay. You look down on the harbour. If the wind blows off the sea it reeks from all the fish killing. But the view’s beautiful.
– I imagine the birds and dassies pine for you when you’re gone.
– Perhaps. But they survive.
Will I? I wonder.
– Tell me about your paintings.
– I don’t talk about my paintings. That’d be deciphering them for you ... telling you how to look.
I’m scared of saying something uncool, so I just let her words float.
– But I’ll tell you why I love hazardous art.
– Hazardous?
– Hazardous. It rents this kind of sharky, cavernous place in your head. Its edges are like some smoky vapour.
I glance at the painting of the shark: jaw unhooked and eyes coldly smug.
– And yet that’s not it either. There isn’t a language for it. It sounds crazy ...
– No. Not crazy.
I snuff at the skin behind an ear foetal-folded and cool-rimmed. She sighs. Art is forgotten. And I sigh too, for I am in no mood to follow her into that sharky place now.
– This is a dream. You and me. A magical dream, yet there’s no future for us. You see that, don’t you? I don’t want you hurting.
– Why just a dream? My dark skin?
– You crazy? I love the yummy colour of your skin: halfway between butternut and cinnamon. It’s just that Al and I have a long history. I fell for him when I was still a schoolgirl and he was a student at Wits. It was so cool to cruise around Jozi in a convertible MG with this older guy who took me to arthouse films and hip bars.
She smiles, recalling perhaps a vision of a younger Lotte, wind-tousled and high on the whirl of a now-vanishing Johannesburg. To cruise around in a convertible these days is begging to be hijacked or shot through your Ray-Banned head.
– It’s just that he no longer makes my blood fizz when he makes love to me.
I sulk.
– I just can’t imagine him tuning into you the way I do. He doesn’t seem the arthouse type.
– He saw the films for me. That’s a measure of his love. He may seem a bit fuddy-duddy and old-line on the surface. But he’s sharp, and honest to the bone. And he’s never hurt me. This sounds shallow and crass, but he’s made a lot of money and that frees us to travel the world, rather than feeling trapped on the edge of it. I want to paint the Taj Mahal and Uluru. I want to put up my paintings in London and New York. I want to hang out in Bali and die in Mexico.
It feels too tacky now to tell her I too want to see the world. It would sound borrowed and callow. Yet I sense I’d want to see it in another way to her. Just the music in the name of a town lures me. I have no defined plan to see any landmarks or to capture anything. I doubt I’d take photographs. I’d just want to drift maplessly through Malacca or Mandalay or Timbuktu or wherever and live the vibe and sip cold beers in dusty cafés and write poems or whatever fell into my head. I’d earn money as I went along by playing my guitar on street corners. (Another Zero mantra: You’ll never starve if you can play the guitar.)
I wonder if Zero has money pocketed away or if the profits from his gigs just tide him over. Perhaps he rides an old Benz not just out of fondness for the square old box, but because he doesn’t have the money to fork out for a Z3 or something jazzy. I may inherit the house in time ... if Phoenix’s old foes don’t find him and burn it down. But that jaded, viewless house so far from the sea would hardly fetch a fortune.
– And me? I’m just a poor boy?
– Not just. You are absurdly beautiful.
I spit out half a laugh. Take note, O Professor.
– You play the guitar sublimely. And you have a way with words that drugs me. And yet ...
– I see.
And I’d had the gall to imagine that if the stars aligned otherwise for us, or if a coin fell tails instead of heads, or if the moon tugged harder ...
38
A FARM SOMEWHERE JUST outside Bloemfontein.
Farmhouse lights burn yellow on a low hill a few miles ahead. Zero cuts the headlights and they ride on by the light of the moon. They abandon the Benz a mile or so from the house and go on by foot.
Two Isuzu pickups are parked in the yard. A boe
rboel dog hurtles towards them, rattling a deep bark from his canines.
Phoenix darts him down. He fondles the dog’s ears as he slides into puzzled slumber.
They find the dirty, dented Cherokee in the garage. TOLK-. The telltale letters kill any doubts.
The door of the farmhouse is ajar.
There’s a TV on (Paul Newman cycling a bicycle in circles) and muffled sounds from below.
They steal down dark cellar steps. Now they hear a whimpering, followed by men laughing. Phoenix goes ahead, lizardly stalking the light at the end of the steps.
A bottle of Old Brown sherry goes from hand to hand among three men. They stand around a crazed-eyed girl with a handkerchief balled in her mouth. She’s on tiptoes, hands tied over her head to a hook in the roof. Her torn dress hangs like shed skin from her hips. Another girl, head hanging down, is tied to a bentwood chair in the corner. She’s naked from head to foot.
The hardtack dulls the senses of the men, but the strung-up girl sees him and her eyes flare.
Phoenix signals to her to stay still. Then he puts the blowpipe to his lips.
A man smacks at his calf, thinking he’s been stung by something waspy. His hand comes away filmed in blood. He’s puzzled by the dart jutting out of his skin. By the time he cottons on and spins round, the world’s tilting. He keels over.
Now Zero’s on the bottom step, his Colt levelled at the other two men.
– Hands up, boys!
One man foolishly goes for a gun in his pocket. Zero puts a bullet into his foot.
The man howls as he hops on his unshot foot.
The third man dives behind the girl on the bentwood. Now he has a blade at her throat.
At that moment Jabulani peeps his head into the cellar. This freaks the guy out and blood slides subtly from under the blade.
– I’ll kill her. I’ll fucking ...
Zero’s bullet fillips his head. His blood fans out against a swastika flag on the wall.
Though the cut is just skin-deep the girl’s voice is a crazy chorus of cicadas in a box.
Zero tugs the flag off the wall to throw over the corpse.
Then he pans a video camera, zooming in on the fear-ridden eyes of the whimpering, foot-shot farmer.
To him Zero jibes:
– You’ll need a vivid imagination to come up with a story your wife falls for, hey?
The farmer lets out a sob.
– Not so cool now, hey?
Turns out, fortuitously, the darted guy’s the Cherokee farmer. They tie him up with nylon ropes he’d used on the girl and bundle him into the boot of the Benz. He mumbles mumbo-jumbo. They stuff the spit-wet gag in his gob.
Zero tasks Phoenix and Jabulani with ferrying the girls to Cape Town on the back seat of the Cherokee.
Canada Dry shoots out the tyres of the Isuzu.
They let the one with the shot foot go. He hobbles along the dusty farm road after the fading red eyes of the Cherokee.
The only thing left alive in the farmyard is a dog under a sneezewood dreaming of catching ever-elusive moles. The spicy scent of the sneezewood pervades the world.
39
HERMANUS MARKET.
I wear a fake smile for Buyu and Hunter and the tourists. One gay guy from Berlin takes all my geckos for the walls of his Thai restaurant. Buyu jives and yahoos.
I ought to feel jazzed but I feel low and blue. I feel burdened by all the pain and injustice and sorrow that lingers below the mundane surface of things in this land.
I mosey over to the seafront for an ice-cream but the pink ice-cream van’s gone. Instead I lie down flat on a rock in front of the Marine Hotel from where I can see the tidal pool far below. I want to zone out on the whizzing of grasshoppers and the hiss of the sea but am joggled by voices and hooting and a miasma of smoked fish and dust and dog dirt.
The spell Lotte cast over this town for me has worn off. The whales have gone. The sun glares down, fading colour out and warping things. Fish mysteriously float gut-up to the surface of the lagoon. A bloom of jellyfish plagues the bay. I catch a snatch of Buffalo Springfield (a line about a man and a gun) from a radio.
I’ve plucked angels and jinns from my guitar. I’ve fingered her nipples as fondly as an old man fingers rosary beads. I’ve followed the fringes of her angel feathers down to the foot of her spine, where they almost touch. I’ve murmured words into her ear till she arced her spine and rubbed her breasts against my ribs. I’ve felt her fingernails cut into my skin. I’ve cajoled a primal yell from between her teeth as her hips thrummed under me. And, in my midsummer folly, I thought I’d wooed her. But she’ll not jilt him for me.
A lone, clown-bald hunchback on a bench blows his vuvuzela in monotoned farts. And between toots he forecasts a red tide.
I fling a stone at a lizard basking on a rock. It vanishes, just as I too will vanish. These rocks, this tidal pool, the old harbour wall, they will all survive long after my fleeting stay.
At noon I hand the stall over to Buyu. I’m proving to be as unfocused at trading as I was at studying.
On the way to the flat I stand and stare down at the old harbour far below. I feel a sweet vertiginous horror at the thought of my bones cracking on the cruel rocks. Just a step forward would end this fanciful dream of surviving as a poet in a world so ruthless and literal, would cure this ill-spent longing for Lotte. I wonder what makes me not jump. Some tenuous, muslin skin of sanity perhaps.
I step away from the taunting void and walk on.
I see a bare-scalped Xhosa girl alone at the tap, shifting a deep drum of water from knee to hip to shoulder. I give her a hand to put it on her head.
She mouths two shy syllables that sound like O sir to my ear but may be a word in her language.
She goes so lightly under her burden. Each lifting of a heel an O, each fall of bare-skinned sole a sighing, slurring sir in the dust of the churchyard.
I wonder how many miles she’ll walk under her burden. I wonder if a boy has loved her yet.
Suddenly I feel ashamed of falling so foolishly into sorrow and gloom when there is such beauty in the world and folk will risk all to live longer under the sun.
I ride my Vespa out on the Maanskynbaai road again, past the lagoon where dead fish glint and a puzzled fish eagle calls from the bare white bones of a tree jutting out of the shallows, past where I wiped out and where a faded red bus dreams of London, past an obsidian-skinned whore in a curt skirt under a pink umbrella, past the road to the brewery, past a shabby ostrich, all the way out to Gansbaai till black, kelpy vines snake out of white dunes. The stringy survivors of a veld fire.
That girl lingers on in the stinging song of cicadas. Red lips beckoning from under a pink half-moon. She’s proof of how radically things have changed in South Africa since Mandela was freed. Then sin and lack were well hidden and whores sold skin in dim alleys by the dockyards. Now good-time girls flag you down at noon from the dunes out Muizenberg way. Then you had to go out to the airport to see the poor in their cartoon shanties. Now you find tents under downtown flyovers, shacks on the slopes above Hout Bay. And now you hear gunshots at night.
Mandela did work his genie magic. For a time you had euphoria and the high-fiving, folk mixing it up and jiving. And all money is no longer in white hands. And there’s no roof on how far you can go. No law to hobble you if you are born black or coloured. Yet, despite his magic, the ghosts of the past just won’t fade out. And for a lot of shanty-town folk freedom is just a word, as hazy as irony. For such folk zilch has changed. Other than the colour of their chief. That’s what’s so ironic.
The place is stark and wind-scoured. Just a scattering of houses by the slipway. A few joints licensed to cage-dive. A bar or two, like a set in a cowboy film. The Freelander’s parked in front of a makeshift warehouse. Wind whistles off the sea. Gulls see-saw on the keels of upturned boats. Otherwise lifeless. Not a dog in sight.
Inside the ill-lit joint they got a bar and a bicycle shop and a blonde flicking thr
ough a magazine. Bicycle frames hang like skeletons from dangling wires. A beautiful Breezer catches my eye. On a flat TV over the bar: a video of slick, silvery sharks gliding languidly by. I imagine the video was shot from a cage. It’s as if I am looking into a fish tank with the great whites reduced to the scale of reef sharks.
An old black guy’s spinning the wheel of an upended bicycle to fine-tune the spokes till the wheel runs true. He’s singing a Xhosa song riddled with recurring clicks and pops, his tongue clicking in the hollow of his cheeks as if he’s cajoling a lazy donkey.
The girl licks a fingertip now and then, before flicking over another page. Her eyes hover on a photo of a naked ginger-haired girl riding a white horse along a beach.
– You like her? she says without glancing up at me.
I want to say: I like just one girl. I like every fish-belly-pale inch of her. I love her wings and her way of luring birds. And if I can’t have her I’ll pine for her forever.
– She’s pretty, I say.
– Here. You can have her.
She tears the pic out of the magazine and hands it to me, then goes on flicking through static worlds. I fold it up and put it in my pocket.
– You never saw girls naked in the old SA, hey?
For me as a boy in Amsterdam this was old hat. One time my mother found a girly magazine in my desk drawer. Instead of scolding me she took a pen and drew an eyepatch over a girl’s left eye and put it back. She could have drawn stars over her nipples but she inked out an eye instead. I knew it was her because she had a photo of that Jew warrior Dayan and his trademark eyepatch that she’d torn out of a newspaper years before. Dayan was a hero to her just as Bono was to me. It puzzled me, what she’d done. And yet I was too ashamed to ever ask why. Years later at school in Cape Town a hockey ball split the skin along my cheekbone. I drew a line with a red Koki on the face of one of her gnomes to mimic my wound. Perhaps by then, with my sister dead, she was too far gone to see what a random red line had to do with an eyepatch.
I just nod. Zero told me so. Not white girls. Just potent (his word), beaded Zulu tits on postcards from Durban.
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