‘You think they gonna get it?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘I hope so.’
The strike broke a few days later and shortly afterwards Rochelle sent Adam a message to say that the package had arrived.
‘Aniya got it. She love it, man. I’m so happy right now. I wish I could have seen her face,’ he said.
‘When was the last time you actually saw her face?’
‘When she was a baby, in England.’
‘You should Skype her, Adam. We can do it right now, from my computer.’
‘Okay.’
‘Call Rochelle, ask her for her Skype details.’
‘Okay.’
Adam called Rochelle’s number.
‘Hello.’
‘Yow Rochelle, it’s me. I’m with Sean. We want to call Aniya over the Internet.’
‘Do you have Tango? Aniya uses Tango to make free calls over the Internet.’
‘Tang … yow Sean?’
I shook my head.
‘Sean never heard of Tango.’
‘We can download it,’ I whispered.
‘We gonna get it,’ Adam said. ‘We gonna call you again.’
We raced back to my computer and downloaded the Tango app, but I couldn’t get it to work. Adam consulted with Rochelle.
‘She says Aniya has gone to her friend now anyway. She is going to try to get Skype. We can call them again next Saturday.’
We called Rochelle’s new Skype account a week later, without success. Adam called her cell from the landline, but the number rang and rang.
‘Can we try again next Saturday?’
‘Sure. Anytime.’
This went on weekend after weekend. An arrangement would be made, and something would go wrong. In most cases, something had come up on their side and, since Adam had no phone, Rochelle was unable to inform him. I began to feel put upon. Each failure cost several hours and left me feeling anxious and unhappy. I worried that these failures to connect were somehow deliberate, that Rochelle might be dodging Adam – us. No, it is the us that bothers me. When Adam makes contact, it’s always and inevitably us. If I’m not seated next to him in the car, then I’m in the 24-hour pharmacy on Darling Street, buying toiletries I don’t really need. I can’t go far, because if my phone locks my help will be needed to unlock it. He remembers a dozen phone numbers, but can never remember my four-digit phone code.
As the week went by without a single call or message from Adam, I started to feel a building relief. For the first time in months, a Saturday lay open before me. No deadlines, no commitments, no reason to leave the house at all. By now, I should know better than to allow a situation like this to develop, but I couldn’t bring myself to intervene, to give up the rare and delicious gift of time. And so the inevitable happened. I squandered it in the old way, starting up shortly after lunch, so that I would be sober in time for dinner with my wife. When she had gone to bed, I picked up where I had left off. I lay down for a few hours in the early morning, but did not sleep. I counted off my wife’s waking routine – run with the dog, shower, blow-dry, make-up – and stood up to see her off to work. I was about to kick out again – to take it to hell and down – when Adam called.
‘Rochelle says Aniya is going to be ready at 10. It’s going to happen this time.’
I closed my eyes, allowed purple and yellow figments to build up and swirl behind my eyelids. ‘Sure. I’ll leave now. I’ll pick you up at the Beachboy Office in 15 minutes.’
I reckon I could do the rest with my eyes closed; it may even be safer that way. There’s a lonely inexorability to the familiar routine, especially on weekends. If the Conquest is facing downslope, I simply release the handbrake and let gravity pull us away from the gate. I run well-known intersections for want of traffic, only slowing out of necessity. I drift over De Waal Drive and into the lonely, open fields of what was once District Six. I send the car under Nelson Mandela Boulevard at the Chapel Street circle, the lazy screech of the balding tyres amplified by the bridge mouth. This morning, residents of the Chapel Street night shelter were smoking on crates they had pulled out onto the sun-bathed pavement. On Main Road, working down to Albert, anyone not fixed to their own front yard and family seemed to be going about chores with an intensity that glorifies families and stoeps in general. Finally, I pulled up outside the marble and granite business, and took my pick of the bays. The guard, who knows my car by now, waved. I killed the engine and reclined the seat. Normally I leave the car and walk alongside the freeway on the Beachboys’ towpath, then dip down to The Kitchen to greet Sudi, Barak and the others. Today, I closed my eyes and waited for Adam to come to me.
Walking back into my office I received a shock, as if I’d stumbled into a crime scene. Shoes and papers were scattered around the floor, empty mugs and glasses and oat-begrimed bowls crowded the tables. I’d left the paraphernalia of my binge next to the keyboard, a business card curled in on itself.
Sean Christie – Foreign Policy Correspondent
I groaned.
‘You okay?’ asked Adam. I shook my head.
‘I thought you stopped, but actually I knew it. You look red, like a balloon.’
‘I’ve felt better.’
‘I understand.’
‘I know.’
I clicked the green telephone icon on Skype. Dialling sounds from the machine resolved with a crackle of feedback into two faces, a mother and her child, eyes flickering in our direction but not yet focused on anything in particular.
‘Aniya!’ Adam shouted. ‘Can you hear me, Aniya?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Amazing. Did you just wake up? What time did you wake up?’
Too many questions; the little girl shrank towards her mother.
‘Aniya?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
‘I always loved you. Oh my god,’ said Adam, his voice cracking. ‘So, did you have breakfast?’
‘Ummm.’
‘Are you shy? Don’t be shy. It’s your daddy. Fucking amazing. I can’t believe it. Aniya?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Everything gonna be okay. I love you.’
Rochelle cut in. ‘She looks just like you.’
‘You think?’ said Adam, blowing kisses to the screen. Mwah, mwah, mwah. ‘Aniya, you look just like your mum. Beautiful. You have her nose and everything. I wish I was there with you. A weekend like this, we’re supposed to watch a football match.’
‘She don’t like football, she’s a girl,’ said Rochelle.
‘But I’d like to take her. I don’t know why I had that thought.’
I made to leave.
‘Sean, come here a second.’
I picked up my Airedale terrier and walked into view.
‘You see the dog, Aniya?’ said Adam. ‘His name is Barkly, he looks like a teddy bear.’
‘Yeah.’
I put the dog’s big wet nose up to the screen, eclipsing the room view, then retreated. The dog licked my face and convulsed out of my grip.
‘He didn’t like it when you did that,’ Aniya scolded, her forehead creased. Now she looked like Adam – uncannily so, with her fierce dark eyes and eyebrows, her high cheekbones and caramel skin.
‘This is my friend Sean, you hear me Aniya. This is his place. His wife’s name is Andret. They’re trying to have a baby. She was pregnant already but they lost it. I know they gonna get their baby though. Inshallah. That is what we say, inshallah.’
I waved and fled the room, unable to stand the unexpected scrutiny a second longer. But, no matter where I went in the house, I could still hear Adam talking, asking Aniya about school, telling her she should behave, listen to her mother. I stepped outside, felt uneasy in the sun. The dog let rip at a pedestrian so I
dragged him inside and shut the door, then walked to the far side of the house, to the bathroom, which was cave-dark. I put the lid of the toilet down, and sat back. You’ve got to make those changes, I mumbled. Over and over.
Then Adam laughed – a clean, joyful sound, with none of life’s scum on it. I stood up.
Okay. Everything gonna be okay.
◆
Lovely, sunny afternoon.
I called Sudi and Adam and said I knew a place where we could go and enjoy the sunshine. They climbed into the Conquest outside the Grand Parade KFC and we hauled up to Deer Park, on the mountain slopes above the city. The Platteklip River runs through it, so named because the early Cape slaves used to wash laundry on the flat rocks above the weir. Today, the waters attract the sack Rastas who bathe under a secret waterfall upslope, and also a constant stream of Pentecostalists who take away bottles of the stuff for use in ritual cleansing ceremonies. Dog walkers come and go, and some drug smokers.
Here and there on the banks, under a mix of indigenous trees, pines and eucalypts, are some concrete tables and benches and, at a specific point where the riverside trees have knitted, some inspired crew has placed a table in the river. If you get there first at this time of year, you can enjoy water around your ankles while you eat and drink.
‘Beautiful place,’ said Adam, removing a pair of paint-flecked work boots. ‘In Tanzania, somebody would make you pay to come to a place like this.’
Sudi mumbled something in Swahili.
‘Sudi say he thought black people are not allowed on the mountain.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. In Tanzania there are too many places only white people can go. Or you need to have money to be there, but most Tanzanians got no money. It is the same here in Cape Town. If we go into the city from the Parade the CCID follow us, and they never leave. If you try to go into a bar they tell you no, sorry, this place is not for you.’
The range of the Beachboys has been successfully confined to the freeway bridges, highway culverts and railway reserve, where the city has little jurisdiction (the railway reserve is the property of the state transport parastatal, Transnet). Only Transnet can initiate and drive eviction proceedings in these areas, but the repeated demands for it to do so seem to fall on deaf ears. But, even here, movement is restricted.
‘We got our own politics, and not every Beachboy is free to go wherever he wants,’ said Adam.
The revelation came as a surprise.
‘You seem to go where you like.’
‘Memory can go anywhere,’ said Sudi, ‘but not others.’
It has to do with Adam’s stowaway record, Sudi explained. By his reckoning, Adam is currently Cape Town’s most effective stowaway. In the past 12 months alone he has made it to sea three times, an extraordinary feat in this time of heightened port and ship security.
‘Many Beachboys have been trying to stow away for five years and more, without success,’ said Sudi.
And then, of course, there is the matter of Adam’s years in England. In all the Beachboy community here, which I estimate at between one hundred and fifty and three hundred individuals (based on the number of subscriptions that are paid whenever a Beachboy dies), no more than a handful have actually made it through the western world’s immigration nets and spent time living abroad. For those who have, the achievement is worth more than Olympic gold. It allows them to cross effortlessly over community faultlines. Adam walks where he wishes, and is never far from being asked to join a meal or share a joint. The younger Beachboys want to hear his stories and ask for his advice. They would queue up to accompany him to the docks – pay him for the privilege, even – if it weren’t well known that he prefers to go it alone.
But Sudi was quick to add that admiration often masks jealousy down on the Foreshore.
‘After Memory went the last time, some guys came and said, “Sudi, show us where Memory keeps his mkoba [medicine bag].” They think he must be witches [a witchdoctor] to do everything he done.’
Adam was hearing this for the first time, and he looked concerned. He interrogated Sudi furiously in Swahili, and exited this exchange saying, ‘Nah, that’s bullshit, man. They might think they were making a joke but saying that I have a mkoba is no fucking joke. It could get me killed.’
I was lost, and must have looked it. Adam explained.
‘There are too many evil witches in Tanzania. If a Tanzanian person is jealous of somebody, he can go and see an uchawi [witchdoctor] and pay the uchawi to make a spell. After that you can be sure something will happen to the person he was jealous of. That person might have an accident, or somebody might put his eye out in a fight. Sometimes there will be nothing wrong with him, and an hour later he will be dead.’
‘You really believe that?’
‘Of course, Sean, of course. One of our boys was killed by witches just the other day. His name was Chandiraya, an old guy, experienced guy. He went to the Stones during low tide, and he was walking on the other side in water this deep,’ said Adam, sloshing his feet around in the river.
‘Some other guys saw him walking like that, but when they looked again Chandiraya was gone. He drowned, in water up to his socks. We call a death like this a chanous. Somebody put witches on Chandiraya, no doubt about it. Maybe it was one of us. Or it could have been somebody in Tanzania. It doesn’t matter how far away you are, because witches fly around at night, they can get you anywhere.’
I studied Adam closely. He had slipped into his theatrical mode, but seemed to believe everything he was saying.
‘You sound like you’re afraid of witchdoctors?’
‘I am afraid, I can’t lie. I can go to any ghetto, California or anywhere, I won’t be scared. I can explain myself to those niggers and we will understand each other. But this witches stuff scares me. You don’t know when they want you. You don’t know what they think of you. You can see an old woman every day and she says, “I love you,” but actually she might have a different plan for you, an evil plan. If I ever get money I will never let anyone in Tanzania know. I will pretend I got fokol, because what witches like is somebody with nothing – somebody who don’t think of a better life. If a witch thinks you’re going to get a better future, they will destroy you. If you’re clever, making good business, they hate that, I don’t know why. These African witches ...’
Adam’s eyes were ablaze. He sucked his cheeks in and let his words trail away.
‘They’re all poor, and they deserve to be poor. If you give them money, they will take it and say thank you, asante sana, but at night they will take out their mkoba and curse that money, and you will never get a penny again.’
The Beachboys, Adam and Sudi agreed, were somewhat buffered from the scourge of witchcraft by the fact that powers of uchawi are generally matrilineal and there are no female Tanzanians living among the Beachboys. There are exceptions, though, said Adam.
‘A boy can get his mummy’s power if there is no daughter. But if this has happened to any Beachboy he would never tell nobody, not even his achoose, because he knows people will be proper frightened. They might even try do something to him before he can put witches on anyone. That’s why it was no joke for those boys to say what they said about me. Somebody might hear it the wrong way, and tell another guy. In one week everybody will be saying, “Ah Memory Card, that guy is uchawi, see how many ships he already got.” And they might try to take me down.’
Adam said some Beachboys feared witchcraft more than others – and that those who truly believed in it tended to be the ones who had grown up in rural villages.
‘I grew up in the bush, and there were witches everywhere. I knew this one boy from the village, name of Mohamed, who disappeared one day and nobody saw him again. His family called a big witchdoctor, because sometimes a big witchdoctor can save a person, bring him back. But this guy said it was too late, because the witches had already c
ut Mohamed’s tongue out. This guy said they put Mohamed inside a tree, a big tree in a big forest. Mohamed had been sitting there so long his bum had become like a big wound, all the skin coming off and dying. He said there’s nothing nobody can do to save that boy. And you know who done it? The people knew; it was his father-in-law’s sister.’
When Adam stopped talking, the sounds of the forest came up, the gurgle of water and the creaking of the nearby stone pines in a gentle breeze. Some red-winged starlings whistled to one another, somewhere out of sight.
And, behind it all, the now-reassuring drone of city traffic.
◆
Daniel Peter, the young boxer from Keko, has a new friend called Aisha, a 21-year-old coloured man of the sakman order of Rastafarians, so called for their ethic of wearing clothes fashioned entirely from jute. For months, since Daniel Peter’s return from Johannesburg, the oddly matched youths have shared a section of the Lower Plein Street pavement. Each morning, the Rastafarian sets out a flax mat and populates it with ‘bush medicines’ from the slopes of Table Mountain – mainly imphepho at this time of the year, alongside some bunches of lemony confetti bush and sprigs of bloublomsalie. Daniel Peter stands beside him from noon onwards and hustles marijuana.
They could hardly be less alike. Daniel Peter, like many other Beachboys, has embraced the low-slung jeans and jewellery of American hip hop culture. Aisha goes about barefoot and wears nothing but a sack cilice fashioned from a Finca el Retiro coffee bag, the brand name upside down across his abdomen. Following the rules of his order the dreadlocked youth washes at least once a day, eats no meat and smokes only Jah’s sacred herb. Daniel Peter smokes unga, relishes boiled cow head and, like most other Beachboys, can go for weeks without washing, especially in winter.
There is a more fundamental difference. The sack Rastas see themselves as the true indigenes of this place, tracing their ancestry all the way back to the Goringhaicona people who lived in the valleys of Table Mountain in precolonial times. They will tell you about Autshumao, the Goringhaicona leader who received the Dutch settler Jan van Riebeeck when he and his men sailed into Table Bay in 1652, and will claim Krotoa, Autshumao’s niece and later Van Riebeeck’s interpreter, as one of his progenitor grandmothers. They will always call Table Mountain by its Khoe name: Hoerikwaggo, the mountain in the sea.
Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard Page 13
