Blood Orange

by Troy Blacklaws

  On the garage roof, among the pumpkins, her salt tears sting my broken skin after Visoog Vorster caned me.

  On this shore, in the old days, land pirates used to lure storm-tossed ships onto the rocks with lamps and illusions of rescue and then ransack the splintered boats before they sank.

  Here, at the foot of England, I lose myself in the ritual of bartering for crayfish, the long runs along the sea or across the moor, Camus’s cold Stella and philosophic meanderings. But when, out of the blue, I hear Eddie Grant sing Give me Hope, Joanna on the radio, Africa shivers through my blood like a reflex shrinking of the balls.

  I hear a boy and girl flirt in Afrikaans on the harbour wall at sunset. An English sunset: tepid orange, like white wine from black grapes. Wine denied time to draw the red from the skins. The boy and girl seem so carefree and uncluttered by the past that I let them be. I go back into the windowless room with my bruised-fruit bitterness, wishing for a blood-orange sunset. Undiluted, flaming blood orange. The sunset that ends another day of a man footing after a Firestone tyre from Paarl to Groot Drakenstein to Franschhoek.

  When Africa ripples through me I see the tusk-white house under the Simonsberg, and the Berg River wind through the valley. I recall the taste of udderhot milk, the sweet juice of hand-plucked peaches, and the orange teardrops you find when you peel the skin off a wedge of orange. I even see the outline of Africa in rain puddles and in the foam of my pee in the toilet bowl. For me Africa does not end in Morocco. I hear and see its echoes everywhere.

  Mister Slater taught me that Jung travelled away from the time-bound mindworld of Switzerland to find the buried self of timeless raw instinct in Africa: so raw he could smell the blood that had seeped into the land. In England all the land is tamed and I yearn for the wild veld.

  I have roots in England. My forefathers traded in fish fished out of this same Bristol Channel. And have I not been teased all my Paarl Boys’ days for being a rooinek Englishman? Yet I do not feel at all English. I am a homesick kaffirboetie who misses the sound of Xhosa, that unending river of clicks, and the smell of the dust that creeps into sandals and hides between toes.

  And I miss black faces. Mila. Nana. The hobbling man at the BP garage at Simondium, who always wipes the windows and checks the tyres and water, knowing my mother will give him a Christmas box. The women who pack purchases into bags at the Spar. The men who wash your motorcar while it is parked in the sun, for two rand. The barefoot schoolboys who trade handmade wire bicycles and windmills at the crossroads in Klapmuts.

  Strange that I should feel so English in Africa and dream of Europe, and so foreign in England and long for Africa again.

  Soutpiel, Maljan would call me. My salty cock dangling in the Atlantic.

  Still, it is good to be free from the yoke of unbending rules I have lived under in South Africa.

  Don’t keep snakes under your desk. Don’t chatter like bloody mousebirds in class or you will get the ruler. Don’t bleed ink on your textbooks or you will get the cane. Don’t walk around with your blazer unbuttoned, even if the sun blazes down, or you will be for the high jump. Shave your hair. Shine your shoes. Stand in rows when the bell goes for school.

  Don’t pee in a non-white toilet, even if you have to pinch. Don’t go into the post office through the non-white door, or the lady with the bun on her head will snap at you. Don’t sit on a non-white bench, even if it is free or if it happens to be the only shady bench, for the police are on the lookout for such blackbench boys. Don’t go into the third-class compartment of a train, for only non-whites have the right to travel third class.

  I break. The balls scatter, ricochet, but not one heads for a hole. I hand Jimi the cue. He chalks it with blue chalk while his eyes dart around the green felt. There is a smirk on his lips. I can tell he is going for the kill.

  His first shot sends a ball flying down a far pocket. I can’t bear to watch him clean up, so I turn to Marina, Jimi’s girl, and tell her of all the things forbidden in South Africa.

  – Oh you poor thing, just imagine not even having the freedom to sit on any bench that is free, goes Marina.

  Put that way, and after a few beers, it does seem that I suffered unduly.

  In Devon the hedges are so high they obscure the view, but as I run I have sudden glimpses of Van Gogh grass through gaps. Then blurred hedge again. It is like looking through a viewfinder that goes blank between frames, then drops into focus.

  I see a flat hedgehog on the road and it reminds me of a story Granny Barter told of how, when she was a little girl in Gloucestershire, she found a hedgehog in the snow and thought it was dead. Her mother put it in the oven until it uncurled from its deep sleep.

  I glance over my shoulder as I run through Lynton, up on the hill above Lynmouth, half expecting to see the spluttering, raving sarmajoor with Boyd in tow. The sarmajoor blundering through Dorset, a baboon in a tea-room.

  Camus asks me why I ran from the army:

  – For political reasons?

  – Yes.

  I lie. I ran because I was scared the sarmajoor would drill me dead into the dust.

  – Hmmm. Will you stay on at the hotel as a kitchen porter or do you have other plans?

  – I dream of seeing the world.

  It sounds cheeky coming from the no-visa guy who beheads trout and murders crayfish in-between bellhopping for old ladies.

  – Then what the fuck are you doing in Devon? laughs Camus.

  – I think your dream’s cool, says Marina.

  – Your dream would have to be devoid of a plan to be truly existentialist, Camus adds.

  Jimi just says:

  – Set ’em up. I’ll break.

  So I set up the balls, knowing full well he will beat me hollow again. Jimi breaks the balls so wildly that the white flies off the green felt and cracks a pint glass that bleeds black Guinness across the bar. Camus hardly glances up, so absorbed is he in enlightening us on existentialism:

  – It is when the same day spins out forever.

  No doubt in the same town, I think to myself.

  – And all experience is equal. Peeing beer into the urinal is just as significant as painting a canvas, or making love.

  There’s an old fisherman in Lynmouth, known to all as Jo-the-Fish. There’s Jo-the-Fish and Jim-the-Spade, who tends the flowers (and who once dug up the corpse of a young girl who was buried behind the inn without her head).

  His sheepdog is always on his heels, a dogged shadow. Jo-the-Fish trades fish for a beer at the hotel and his dog curls up under his barstool during the long hours of gazing into the amber. He trades fish for ganja from a boat anchored in the fog of the Bristol Channel.

  Down on the pebbled beach one night, Jo-the-Fish parcels out his magic by a driftwood fire. Flames dance in the eyes of the sheepdog as he gazes at his master. Marina holds her lighter to the resin in her fingers, then scratches it into a paper furrow, mixing it in with Javaanse Jongens tobacco.

  beach boy

  A POSTCARD OF NYHAVN in Copenhagen comes with the hotel post. Jimi teases me because red lips kissed it over the handwriting. The letters slant like blades of grass in the wind. It is a reply to my postcard of Lynmouth harbour with the boats keeling on the mud at low tide, sent from Devon to Cape Town and forwarded from Cape Town to Denmark.

  My dear beach boy

  I am back in Copenhagen. You remember when we met in the Blue Note Café and I was reading Out of Africa and you told me of your friend in Copenhagen? Well, here I sit in a café in Nyhavn and think of my South African and how hard it must have been in the army for you to run away. I wish you had run to Denmark. At night I work in a bar, called the Yellow Submarine. Mostly students come. I will always remember the beach in Hout Bay and the red wine on the sea.

  Love

  Zelda

  PS. Maybe you will still come to Copenhagen. I hope so.

  – Sweet red lips for the beach boy. How come we never see you surf the Devon waves? Jimi taunts.

  T
his plucks a raw chord, for I felt so uncool among the Jay Bay surfers with their bronzed bodies and tangled hair, gliding the long slow break while I peered into the shadows for sharks.

  I keep the postcard folded in my pocket for days and days. I fish it out during the lulls in the kitchen. I know it like a liturgy. While the steam mists on the tiles above the sink and the steel-wool skins my fingers raw, I chant her name under my breath:

  Zelda Zelda Zelda

  vowels like dry mouths longing for rain.

  Jo-the-Fish’s sheepdog comes to the bar alone one night. He curls up under the barstool. He whines as dreaming dogs do.

  In my dazed yearning I drop a scrapbook of my photographs and jotted-down images of Africa and love poems for Zelda into a rock pool. It dries on my windowsill but the pages warp wavily and it reminds me of the way stranded earthworms curl when they dry out in the African dust. I post the book to Zelda, because it smells of the sea and reveals my blurred-ink love, and pen a letter for her.

  Dear Zelda

  I am still at my kitchen sink. The hotel is a tortoise-shell world that I could lose myself in but for my longing for you and the Groot Drakenstein valley. There are no mermaids here and there is no beach sand, but this is the same Atlantic that flows into Hout Bay. I would love to see you in the summer in Denmark once I have saved pounds. I may stay in Copenhagen forever if the barmaids are good.

  Love

  Gecko, your beach boy

  Again Jo-the-Fish’s sheepdog comes in alone and dozes under his ritual barstool. After I’ve mopped the kitchen, I skip the ride up to the pub on the hill. I walk along the beach to Jo-the-Fish’s shack under a full moon. His dog follows me. The door is shut. Nailed to the door is the jaw of a fish. A window is ajar. The dog jumps onto a tipped-over wheelbarrow, then onto the sill and inside. I peer into the gloom. I make out a shadowy, headless form. As my eyes adjust I see Jo-the-Fish in a chair, his head slumped forward. A hand dangles to be licked by his dog. You’d think he was asleep, if not for the reek.

  old dog

  GRANDPA BARTER, THE MAN who played hockey for England and taught the prince of Siam, ended up in a madhouse on the flat plains south of Cape Town.

  I went to visit him with my mother and Granny Barter in our old Peugeot 404. We stopped at a roadside stall under a torn Cinzano umbrella to buy some bananas. The coloured man wrapped the bananas in brown paper. I wished we had taken colourful flower-patterned paper along for Grandpa.

  He was drugged and confused. My mother told me they ran charges through him to cure the longing for rum. The frame of his glasses had cracked and was fixed with a plaster that sponged up the oil from his nose. They took his teeth away in case he choked on them. His jowls hung slack and he drooled into the shirt pocket that used to be a quiver full of pencils for the Cape Times crossword. They took his pencils too, in case he stabbed himself or one of the mad ones, or the nurses.

  Grandpa Barter, the word artist, slurred out words. Only Granny could decipher the sounds, from having followed him from Gloucestershire to Siam to Egypt to South Africa.

  The mad ones sat with their heads cocked at a blaring TV, screwed up high on the wall, out of their reach. A bell rang and they all stood to walk haphazardly away, with the jilted TV yelling after them. Grandpa began to fidget restlessly as if he dared not defy the bell.

  I helped my mother rock him to his feet and watched him shuffle down the long empty corridor. His head was bent and his trousers sagged. He reached behind to pull the fabric free of the cleft of his ass, where it had pinched from sitting.

  – Grandpa, I called.

  And he turned to look into my eyes, but no words came to me. Then he winked at me over the plaster rim of his glasses, as if to say: this old dog still has a trick or two up his sleeve. And for a fleeting moment he was the old Grandpa Barter who had made up the story of rescuing the Siamese princess and taught me to Indian dribble a hockey ball.

  A few days later he fell hard and they sent him to Simondium to die under the Simonsberg in a teak deck chair he had made with his own hands. Perhaps, as he looked out over the vineyards towards Paarl Rock, he saw in his mind’s eye, in the winking-eye of his young soul, the green Wye valley on the other side of the world.

  Not long after he died, Granny Barter pined to death. Perhaps that was Grandpa’s last trick, reeling her after him.

  From my sink I hear a caterwauling from in front of the hotel. I run out with rolling pin in hand. On the harbourside a man is writhing on the stones, and two guys in Umbro football shirts are booting him in the ribs. Onlookers yell, beg, taunt. I hear the crack of a rib caving in. I bludgeon one of the boys over the head with the rolling pin. He sags to his knees. I drop the rolling pin and spin on my heels. I race along to the far end of the harbour wall, to the sea. The tide is out and the harbour too shallow. I run along the harbour wall, to the open sea. I hear footfalls on my heels. As I reach the end, I dive.

  I skin my chin on the pebbles before surfacing and clawing my way through the waves. In the corner of my eye stones arrow into the water. A stone stings my head. I dive under and blood smokes past my eye. I feel behind my ear and a flap of skin peels away from my skull. My jaw gapes to yell my fear and I gag on salt water. I come up spewing and spluttering. I tread water, flinching for fear of stones.

  No stone falls. I blink blood out of my eyes. A policeman is chasing the stonethrower along the beach. Just as they reach Jo-the-Fish’s shack, the sheepdog leaps up at the guy. He stumbles and the policeman rugby-tackles him. Outside the hotel the other guy, rubbing his rollingpinned head, is shoved into the back of a policevan. On the harbour wall folk stand, pointing out at me.

  Tianti

  JIMI TELLS ME THE guys are out of jail, that they got off lightly as the one being booted had it coming to him. So I know they’re out there, and that they’ve got it in for me. I run my fingers along the stitched centipede on my shaven head. I sense it’s time to run again.

  In Covent Garden, the café umbrellas flower like hibiscus against the stone. A rastaman comes up the steps from the Underground toilets.

  – Want some acid, brother? Get high for the cost of a pint.

  – I’m not sure.

  – Hey brother, you live until you die.

  – Where you from?

  – T an’ T man.

  – Tianti?

  – Trinidad an’ Tobago.

  I give him two pounds and he gives me a corner of blotting paper, which he calls California Sunshine.

  – Do I swallow it, the sunshine?

  – Jesus. You melt it under your tongue.

  He looks at me with pity in his eyes.

  – Thanks. Goodbye.

  – When I don’t see you, I dream of you, he tunes.

  I glance down at the bit of paper in my hand. When I look up again the rastaman is gone. I stand with it in my hand for a long time, feeling self-conscious and imagining that all the bobbies within a mile must smell it, like a shark smells blood, and be homing in on me. In the end, when no bobby comes, I put it under my tongue as the man said, and it feels dry and scratchy for a moment. I wade through the milling faces and colours of James Street and Neal Street, waiting for something to happen.

  Down a narrow alley I find a hidden wedge of courtyard called Neal’s Yard, and as I sip mango juice and pigeons flutter up into a yellow sky, the acid blooms in my head.

  I stay a long time, holding the rim of the bobbing table, a buoy on a placid sea.

  I tread the transparent water at Boulders while jackass penguins glide under me.

  Revisiting Delarey’s old bar in Soho, I see soundless footage of Soweto on a teevee screwed to the wall like the TV in the madhouse. David Bowie sings China Girl and I drink a pint. The tuneful song is out of synch with the images: toyi-toyi dustfeet fists guns dogs blood sjamboks barricades and a burning bus with tyres in the sky

  Outside in Berwick Street I suck in the colour: yellow honey-dew melons from Brazil, orange melons from Senegal.
>
  – Beautiful ripe mangoes from Ireland, a fruitseller calls.

  On the Underground from Leicester Square out to Heathrow I feel so bowed down by the blood and shit in South Africa. But as the train surfaces into the sunlight my mood picks up, for I am soon to see Lars, my pigeon-killing, gate-swinging idol, and Zelda of the sunflared hair and redwine breasts. A tube cowboy in snakeskin boots jumps on and strums Roger Miller’s King of the Road on the guitar. Londoners dip deeper into their newspapers and books, but an old black man across from me instinctively taps his foot.

  – Hi folks. Thanks for coming to my show. It’s good of you to come. This next song is a song of hope. I can see clearly now the rain is gone ...

  The black man jumps to his feet and jousts his ivory-headed cane in the air as if it is a Zulu assegai.

  The lady next to me pulls her skirt down further over her pink knees. Across from me a bank of newspapers hide the heads.

  The tube-cowboy comes around with a sack, like a deacon gathering the collection in church. I drop in a coin and the black man empties his pockets.

  – Running late folks. Got to do another show. You can come through if you want to.

  He jumps out onto a deserted platform and, as the doors slice closed, his head pops up in the next car. You can just make out the tune of King of the Road seeping through.

  There is a bus from the airport to the Copenhagen central station where Lars is waiting for me. He’s not the type to reveal his feelings but I skip along at his heels as we walk past the gates of Tivoli through the crowded walkway to Nyhavn harbour. Tall men and women glide by like giraffes. Nyhavn is as pretty as the postcard image in my head: canvas umbrellas like wind-filled sails, dazzling white against the pastel houses and wooden ships and blue sky.

  We get hotdogs from a windowed van and Carlsberg beer and feed bits of bread to black-headed seagulls.

  We walk along the cobbled harbourside to see the mermaid, past ships moored to rusty rings. She too is as beautiful as in the postcards, but small and close to shore. I had imagined her being on a solitary island you could only reach by boat. As we arrive, tourists tumble out of a bus on to the harbourside and jump across to the rock to touch her and be photographed with her.