The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories

by Diane Awerbuck

  Her mother is sitting upright in her chair now, twisting the big silver ring around and around her finger, staring straight ahead. Crystal said she would have energy surges. Is this what she meant? She looks kind of crazy. Lilly wishes Crystal would come. Her mother is sweating. Little beads of it line her top lip; there are damp stains under her arms – and she smells. Lilly gets up to close the doors, pulls the curtain over a little, sits down again. What’s with her mother, anyway? Why couldn’t she just have left that damn box well alone? Why does she have to give her the whole damn name-story thing now? What difference does it make why she’s named Lilly? Yeesh, but an activist?

  ‘So you want me to go to law school rather than art school, then?’ she says.

  Adeela sinks back into her chair, puts a hand on Lilly’s arm, ‘I didn’t call you Lilly because I wanted you to be an activist. I did it to remember how strong a woman can be when she really believes in something. Do you understand?’

  Lilly desperately wants to understand.

  Adeela takes a tiny piece of watermelon from the plate Lilly put next to her and takes a bite. Lilly watches. Enough chewing, she wants to yell. Swallow, damn it, swallow. Adeela swallows.

  ‘It’s late for watermelons, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘It is watermelon, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nice, huh? I found it this morning, down at Gianni’s. Have another piece. Look, I took all the pips out.’ Lilly knows her mother thinks it’s criminal to eat anything that’s been flown in from the other side of the world.

  The watermelon feels good in Adeela’s mouth, cool, like drinking from a mountain stream, but it tastes like coal. How does she know what coal tastes like? She doesn’t. Okay, then it tastes like black, pitch black. She knows what that tastes like. Adeela takes another little bite. She wants to see Sukey tonight. Sukey, like the watermelon (Lilly can’t fool her) is also flying in from the other side of the world. And she wants to see Lillian turn nineteen. On Monday.

  ‘I wasn’t named for anyone in particular,’ her mother says. ‘Adeela is the Arabic word for equal.’

  ‘Equal? To what?’

  My father named me that because, he said, I was an equal disappointment to my mother and my sisters. He’d wanted a son.’

  ‘Yeesh, Mom. Why did your mother let him call you that?’

  ‘I was born the day they first began demolishing houses in District Six, where I grew up. My mother said she could hear the bulldozers from where she lay in the Peninsula Maternity Hospital. By the time she got back home, a dozen houses in her neighbourhood were gone. My parents were among those who refused to move. It was a long, long fight. Eventually they gave up.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with your name?’

  ‘Muslims believe it’s a child’s right to be honoured with a good name. The barakah of the name is its lifelong blessing. My mother believed in equality. She said I’d come out fighting and that she hoped I’d keep on fighting, all my life, for things like justice and equality. I couldn’t do it though, Lilly. I tried, but I couldn’t.’

  ‘Mom, it’s all right. Don’t cry. Mom.’ Adeela has her eyes screwed closed. Even so, tears run down her cheeks. ‘It’s okay, Mom. It’s okay. Really, don’t cry.’

  Adeela opens her eyes. She wants to tell Lilly she’ll be all right, just give her a minute, but her daughter is only a silhouette with a voice that seems to come from the other side of the room. Adeela feels a band of dampness spreading down her back. The smell clogs her nostrils; she is repulsed by the stench, short of breath. The pain in her gut tightens like a tourniquet. The glare hurts her head. The room seems to be fracturing into thousands of moving coloured pixels.

  ‘Mom? Mom? Are you okay? I think you’d better lie down now. Mom?’

  Lilly half-carries her mother to the bedroom. Shit. Where is Crystal? ‘Crystal will be here any minute to give you your meds, okay? Then you’ll feel better and can have a good sleep,’ she says. ‘I promise I’ll wake you in time for a bath before Sukey gets here. Okay, Mom? We can wash your hair and I’ll get out the new sweatpants Vanezu brought you at the GAP sale and your favourite polo neck. Okay, Mom?’ Lilly is close to tears. ‘Okay?’

  ‘I want to tell you …’ Adeela whispers.

  ‘No more talking, Mom, okay? Sukey can tell me everything, all right, Mom? Here. I’m going to give you some oxygen.’ Lilly unhooks the oxygen mask and fits it over Adeela’s mouth and nose, slips the elastic behind her head, then lowers her gently onto the pillow. She turns the dial and checks the flow. Where the fuck is Crystal? Of all days to be late. Lilly sits on the edge of her mother’s bed, watches her chest as her breathing slowly eases. She takes her mother’s hand and begins to hum ‘Thula Baba’. It’s a lullaby Adeela used to sing her when she was little. Hush now, be quiet. But Adeela is restless; her free hand picks at the embroidery on the duvet cover. Her left leg jerks in a sudden spasm of pain. Lilly wonders if she can administer the morphine herself. Should she give her mother a sedative? Maybe wait five more minutes. She wishes Vanezu would come, or Victor. Lilly closes her eyes and sings louder. She sings all the names she can remember her mother ever mentioning: Ryder, Huda, Amina (not that she’s ever met or even spoken to any of them) and Peter, her own father (killed by the security forces, Sukey tells her much later, before you were born). She sings the places Adeela has talked about: District Six, Table Mountain, Lavender Hill (where drug lords and gangsters rule and little kids are killed in the crossfire – she’s read about it in the New York Times). ‘Thula thu, thula South Africa, thula wena.’ She sings for Vanezu and for Victor, their longing for Zimbabwe. She sings for Adeela’s homesickness. ‘Thula thu, thula mama, thula thu.’ And for her own ache to be African.

  III. Crystal

  Crystal has her own key, but always uses the buzzer, just to let them know she’s arrived and on her way up. She doesn’t like surprising her patients. She pauses on the landing to catch her breath, unlocks the front door and steps into the apartment. Things are not going well. She knows that before she has taken three steps. Lilly is in Adeela’s room, crooning. The French windows are wide open and the curtains are standing straight out in the stiff breeze. As if it wasn’t chilly enough anyhow. Crystal crosses the room and closes the doors, startling a little bird, one of those nondescript sorts she doesn't know the name of, from its perch. She turns her back on the tree and looks around. The room is tidy, really very tidy, except for an old painted cardboard box (one of Lilly’s latest creations? Hell, no! I know what that is) and a few leaves blown across the floor. The magazines and newspapers have been tidied away. The poetry book she gave Adeela last Thanksgiving is lying on the kitchen table. Crystal recognises the cover at a glance: a naked woman with two pendulous breasts half shielded behind a hand whose fingers are thickened by age or disease. Body Bereft, that’s the title. The poet’s a South African. She thought Adeela might like that, even if the poems were shit. Crystal couldn’t tell. She didn’t know a shitty poem from a good one, not back then. Next to the book is a bunch of white roses, the tips tinged dark green just where the petals begin to curve slightly away from each other. They are still in their plastic sleeve. The place looks poised for a party. Ah, yes. This is the day Adeela’s long-lost friend is coming from South Africa, Sue something. Crystal makes a mental note to put the roses in water as soon as she has a moment.

  September 23, 15h00

  Pulse rate low. Temperature 103.1. Breathing shallow. Patient required oxygen to stabilise. Severe pain in lower back and abdomen. Circulation poor. Urine: smoky. No bowel action.

  Fluid intake: +/- 75 ml

  Solid foods: 1 small piece of watermelon

  Crystal flips back to the previous entries … that’s less than yesterday, less than the day before too. Actually it’s the least she’s eaten in a week. She will have to let Dr Clare know.

  Medication administered

  60 mg oxycoloidn (oral) + 30 mg oral soln-Roxanol (injection)

  And she will have to speak to Lilly. Though
the poor girl can probably tell.

  Crystal can hear Lilly in the bathroom. Toilet flushing, the rush of water as she turns on the shower, groans from the old plumbing. She sits a moment, her back to her friend, and stares out of the big sash window, past the tree with its wizened leaves to the slice of wall with half a window opposite. She wonders who lives there and what they are doing. She hopes they are thirty-something, having wild Saturday-afternoon sex, or cooking a meal together. That there are bright mango-coloured tulips in a vase, music playing … jazz maybe, or something more upbeat. Crystal wants to be invited over for dinner. She wants to go into the home of the healthy, the virile, the rosy-cheeked. She wants to suck marrow from big meaty bones, lick her fingers before wiping them on linen napkins. She wants to pick the olives out of a bowl of glossy green leaves. She wants to be offered a third helping of crushed potatoes with lashings of butter and cracked black pepper just so she can laugh and shake her head – No, I couldn’t possibly manage another mouthful, thank you. She imagines licking a smear of chocolate mousse from the side of her lover’s mouth. Yes, she imagines having a lover. Brazilian. Or French. But Crystal is fifty-seven years old and newly divorced. She is shapeless the way rising dough is shapeless. Her hair is beautiful, though, long and thick. Crystal never colours it, is proud of how dark it still is. She keeps her hair coiled up in a twist at the back of her head and secures it with a large hair grip. This she does often during the day, letting it down and coiling it back up. Fastening it with the hair grip. She wears men’s shirts, good quality and well-cut, buttoned to her throat. Sometimes she adds a silk scarf or a long rope of heavy beads, sometimes an antique brooch. She is particular about wearing natural fibres close to her skin. She has two pairs of Levi’s jeans which she wears on alternate days. She likes the old 501s because she doesn’t have to wrestle them over her hips. Crystal sighs. She knows having a lover is as likely as Adeela seeing snow fall again.

  They met, Crystal and Adeela, only three years ago, on the stairs outside the centre. Adeela had been standing face turned up to the falling snow. They were going to the same case-meeting, had coffee together afterwards across the road where Crystal had noticed Adeela often before. She was always alone, always reading. Crystal did not read much. And certainly not poetry. Adeela had been gentle with her.

  Later, they had cried and laughed over the poems in that book with the pendulous breasts. They had cried for the ranting poet who refused to keep silent about being a woman caught between ageing and death. They had sobbed for Adeela, who had a one-in-a-hundred chance of seeing old age. They had cried for the soon-to-be-orphaned Lilly, sleeping in her room. And in among those tears, Crystal sobbed for herself. Of all the poems they had read out loud to each other that night after Adeela came home from her double mastectomy, she remembers only two lines off by heart:

  this she knows: nobody will ever again breathlessly

  peel desire from her shoulders.

  Adeela is fast asleep, a deep morphine bliss. Crystal gets up and walks across to the kitchen table, picks up the book. She leafs through the pages, watching the familiar titles flip past till she reaches the inside front cover. She reads the note that she wrote:

  Never give up!

  Thanksgiving – 22 November 2012

  Below it, a new inscription, in Adeela’s handwriting, reads:

  For Crystal

  May you live long enough for the tight to become loose, and may you revel

  in all those who are breathless in your company.

  A.

  22 September 2013.

  Crystal guiltily lays the book back on the table, feels she is trespassing. Tears claw up her throat, scald her sockets. She hears Lilly turn off the shower. She cannot cry now. Really, she should have known better than to nurse a friend. Crystal unwraps the cellophane from the flowers, picks out those already drooping and drops them into the stainless steel trashcan. This is it. The very limit. She’s going to quit, just as soon as Adeela goes. She can’t do it anymore. Crystal fills a tall glass vase with water, adds the long-life mix and stirs, gathers up the roses and places them one by one into place, shifts them around a little. There. She lets out a little sigh of satisfaction. What I’d really like to be, she thinks, is a florist.

  Shiva

  Leila Bloch

  On the morning after the night before, she took the service lift down to the ground floor of St Martini Gardens.

  It was time to go. This was one night she was determined to forget. She didn't want to dwell too long on what was hurting her. She never wanted to be someone who compared pain: yours, theirs, ours, mine. But when she was honest she did – all the time. The shame of creeping out of an apartment was nothing. Nothing compared to what happens under lights, on any given night, on the graveyard shift in an emergency ward of a public hospital, anywhere in South Africa. She convinced herself that experience was relative.

  She brushed her hair back and, save for feeling slightly nauseous, convinced herself that she was fine, physically. She took a breath and tried to imagine a life of pure comfort and ease, without the struggle. Impossible, she laughed.

  Earlier that morning, she had disentangled herself from the semi-comatose weight beside her. She quietly extracted herself from his latch. She tried to be as quiet as possible. She wanted to leave before he noticed her and she became as real as traffic, doctor’s bills, the burr of the fridge. She wanted to leave before he noticed that all the lights were left on and the sheets were grimy and lifting off the mattress. She escaped before the confrontation of an interaction.

  It certainly felt like a summer solstice in Cape Town. She had been wearing the same T-shirt for three days, wearing what had spilled from her in the night like a stain. Her cheeks were a lattice of weird patterns; probably from sleeping on an elastic band tied too tightly to her wrist. The red lines in her skin resembled gash marks from an animal, like someone else had done this to her, proof of someone else on her skin.

  She remembered the night before and regretted how in the flood of feeling, without thinking, she was so easily drawn into consuming another person. Their faults, their fuck-ups, all became alluring to her in the night. She had justified his actions without fully understanding her own consent. She had forgotten that no experience comes without a cost. She remembered too late. Everything can have meaning if you let it, she told herself. Don’t let it.

  The night’s side-step had begun in Long Street. Relentless trance beats had pushed them (hazed over) from club to club. Rubbing up against strangers, vein to vein, their humanity thrashed in each other's faces, anxiety ruining any conversation. It was so Cape Town: people spoke through the set and after, conversations were truncated mid-sentence.

  He walked into the club in a cloud of radical self-belief. Arrogance would have been a euphemism for his behaviour; wild and hedonistic, he was not afraid to take what he wanted. He was the first to take off his top in the sweaty club, even his chest hairs swirled like the stars of Van Gogh’s starry night. He kissed four other girls before noticing her, but she didn’t care. He claimed he had superior genes: he was reproductively relevant, smarter, more aggressive.

  The night’s comedown began on the staircase of the Waiting Room. At this point, she was unaware that she had begun to memorise this person, merge his story with her own. This happened before muscle memory had set in and he had begun to weigh down on her now-heavy suitcase skin. She still felt malleable. All she wanted was to be witnessed. Someone noticed the detail of her eyelash on her cheek, her missing earring and tucked her hair behind her ear. This was all she needed.

  Before the language of desire, these simple gestures were illuminating. She had begged for it, she so easily gave into it and when she had it, her body sang. She had asked for this.

  They were drinking fast and sudden, competing to see who would be the first to surrender. When he came back from the bathroom he laughed. ‘You can take a whore to the water,’ he said, ‘but she’ll still order champagne.’ He felt
her breast, lumpy, his eyes softened – ‘Do you have cancer?’ he asked.

  At this point, she would do anything to wake up next to unfamiliar skin, in a different time, with a foreign language on her tongue.

  They drove up at to 24-hour petrol station, calling it the party Engen on Orange Street. It was overpopulated. Crowded at three a.m. People hovering, demanding ice cream; someone had vomited in the toiletry aisle.

  She could forget the details of the event but it was becoming harder to remove the feeling: she has jamais vu, the opposite of déjà vu, the familiar made unfamiliar, which helps make every experience feel like the first time, which must be why she kept on making the same mistakes.

  She would distract herself, do the opposite of what she would usually – she would take the back roads, continue driving in the opposite direction. To forget means cultivating distraction; that is the only way out, or else she would remember the night before for too long. Getting in her beaten-up, dirty car, she grimaced at the window taped down with a black bag.

  The memory resurfaced. He had pinned her to the wall of the petrol station, with a knife, at three a.m.

  Driving, she watched as people in the street began their day again. The homeless couple who live between the Centre for the Book and St Martini Gardens were only then waking. Still caught in a sleepy embrace, they pumped music from a stolen radio. When she asked how they were, they responded with the surbuban cliché: ‘Surviving’.