The Last Sentence
The Last Sentence
Tumelo Buthelezi
First published by BlackBird Books, an imprint of Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd, in 2018
10 Orange Street
Sunnyside
Auckland Park 2092
South Africa
+2711 628 3200
www.jacana.co.za
© Tumelo Buthelezi, 2018
All rights reserved.
d-PDF 978-1-928337-64-5
ePUB 978-1-928337-65-2
mobi file 978-1-928337-66-9
Cover design by Palesa Motsomi
Editing by Nkhensani Manabe and TO Molefe
Proofreading by Linda Da Nova
Job no. 003296
See a complete list of BlackBird Books titles at www.jacana.co.za
To all who will take the time to read the words to come … thank you.
Contents
Prologue
One: A Call
Two: Room 28
Three: The Reckoning
Four: The Trial of Bandile Ndala (Part I)
Five: The Trial of Bandile Ndala (Part II)
Six: The Sentence
Seven: House Rules
Eight: The Beginning
Nine: The Writer’s Plight
Ten: The Power in Pain
Eleven: The Review
Twelve: The End
Thirteen: Interlude
Fourteen: Cursed Blessing
Fifteen: Nearest Exit
Sixteen: Bitter Pill
Seventeen: The Wait
Eighteen: Speedoom
Nineteen: Memory Cul-De-Sac
Twenty: Faded Stars
Twenty-One: Pushing On
Twenty-Two: The Lull
Twenty-Three: Roots
Twenty-Four: Another Ending
Twenty-Five: The First Words
Prologue
JUNE 18, 2015 … THE DAY I died. Winter’s cryogenic curse cost me my life – aided by several others with whom I shall deal with, in time. That day I dismissed the shivers that had been running down my spine as a symptom of the frosty conditions. My first of two fatal mistakes. My parents taught me better than to disregard the ancestors’ warnings, however subtle, that danger lay ahead.
Look where that got me. Dead. Murdered, on one of the coldest nights of that year.
See, I always wished upon the brightest star that I’d be a special somebody before it was my turn to bite the dust. Award winning. Trending on timelines. Celebrated. But I died as just another entry in the catalogue of missing people around the country.
I was snatched from this earth before I could make my mark.
The fateful day seemed to be an ordinary Thursday. Dark clouds clung to the sky and a persistent, cold wind swept up leaves, garbage and dust in tiny vortices before letting them fall to the city streets. I was in the rehearsal studio going through the script of a stage production in which I had been cast as lead. The star, my darlings. The next Terry Pheto. A Leleti Khumalo in the making.
Or at least I was, in the life I was meant to have. Upon my death the role that I’d been spending weeks struggling to perfect was given to my understudy, who is not destined for the greatness that I was. There were no headlines of “Molly Shabalala Shines Again” in the arts and culture section of Varsity Views, the student newspaper at the University of Egoli, where I was the top performing arts student.
The role that was supposed to send me to new heights was that of Matilda, Tilly, the cheating wife in Can Themba’s The Suit.
I struggled to relate to her. We were so … different.
To start with, I’d never cheated on anyone. Horror of horrors, I died a virgin. Please, for goodness sake, I was no prude. I was not saving myself for marriage. It’s just that … I hadn’t come across the one. The man, woman, or whatever, whose mind, body and soul made mine want nothing but to get lost in theirs. Plus, I had other priorities. My career above everything. Practice makes perfect. Ten thousand hours on stage and screen. That was my goal, the magic number I’d been counting up to since my first play in primary school.
Looking into the studio mirror, I sounded the total so far aloud.
“Two thousand eight hundred and ninety-nine.”
I groaned.
Barely a third of the way there. I had no time to waste on seduction and desires of the flesh when my dreams were of so much more.
No one, or nothing, was going to steal my destiny.
The pleasure of watching uBaba eat his words when my face was on billboards all over Johannesburg was to be the icing on the cake to celebrate my arrival as a star. He was going to regret the day he refused to pay his youngest daughter’s varsity fees unless she was studying medicine or, like he did, law.
That’s if I can crack Matilda open, I thought.
I threw the script into the air and took a deep breath. I knew that to convincingly play a character I had to get under their skin. Matilda was as difficult to get into as a fortress. To me she was a female lead that could only have been written by a man.
Don’t get me wrong. Even in the afterlife I still have the utmost respect for Can Themba’s legacy. But in what world does any woman allow a man, her husband, to humiliate her over and over again for her infidelity like Matilda does? Why doesn’t she leave? Shame? Fear? Masochism?
That could never be me, shem.
“Urg, but it has to be me. I have to be Tilly,” I said aloud, again facing the mirror.
I took a moment to admire my slender frame, the result of watching what I ate and staying active. I sighed and brushed my long braids to one side.
“Tilly, Tilly, Tilly,” I said.
I thought maybe if I said her name into the mirror three times it would summon her like the monster in a movie I watched when I was a kid. I forgot the name.
Just then, my phone chimed with the notification of a dying battery. It brought me back to reality. I had no idea what time it was. I looked at my wristwatch and gasped. 8:35pm. I was late. The last train home to Midrand was set to leave in 20 minutes. The station was 15 minutes away.
I grabbed my things and bolted out of the studio.
Shivers again ran down my spine. Still I ignored the feeling that something was not right. Police sirens nearby and the private security that patrolled the area made it easier to do this. I put the tingles of worry aside and started off in the direction of Rosebank Station.
Picking up the pace, I tried to put my struggles with getting into Tilly’s head out of my mind. I was also trying not to think about my boyfriend. Well, ex. Earlier that day he dumped me by text message. The coward didn’t even have the decency to say it to my face.
Then, there was my father and sister. Both of them had been pestering me to reconsider my career choice. So far I’d resisted their attempts to sow seeds of doubt. But for how much longer?
Forget them, I told myself. I had to focus on this play. It was going to be the next step in my journey to success and touring the world.
I walked quickly, not out of fear but by muscle memory.
One of the benefits of growing up in a small town in KwaZulu-Natal, where I had no choice but to walk to the shops, school and church, was that I could easily, and quickly, cover long distances on foot. My feet glided over the pavement with the vitality of youth as I weaved through backstreets to take the shortest route.
With seven minutes left until I got to the station, I began to worry that I might not make it in time. That’s when I decided to take a shortcut through the central park. My second and final fatal mistake.
I didn’t know that four pairs of eyes had been waiting for someone like me to pass by the trees behind which they were hiding. Those eyes were now fixed on me as I walke
d towards them.
Make it to the station on time, then home to a bubble bath and relaxing music. That’s all I was thinking, unaware I was at death’s door.
I was imagining warm, soapy water against my skin. So preoccupied was I that my mind barely had a chance to process the emergence of a shadow creeping swiftly towards me. It belonged to a masked man.
In seconds the man had launched himself at me and knocked me over. He was on top of me and had me pinned to the ground before I even understood what was happening.
“Got her,” I heard him say to his accomplices.
The thug fixed his hands around my throat and slammed my head into the cobblestone. I saw stars. His accomplice put into my mouth a dirty cloth that smelled of petrol, then put his greasy hand over it. The fumes made me choke and my eyes water.
Dizzied, I tried to fight, kicking the thug on top of me with my knees. That’s when I felt a pair of hands pin down my feet. A third man. That was it. They had me. It was quick and efficient, like they had done this many times before.
“Quickly, put her to sleep,” I heard one of them say, a fourth man standing nearby.
“She seems young. Strong and fresh,” the one on top of me said.
“And pure,” the hooligan next to him added.
“Quiet, you two,” hissed the fourth man, the one I assumed was keeping watch as his mates captured me.
The sirens I’d heard earlier had faded into the distance. The security guards that patrolled the area were nowhere to be seen. The wound at the back of my head ached and each breath of air I tried to take to let out a cry for help was filled with disorienting petrol fumes.
As the masked man on top of me squeezed my neck harder, cutting off my air supply with his bare hands, the life I could have had flashed before me. I felt cheated. Even though I had to accept that the gangsters were going to steal my body, I refused to let them steal my dreams of becoming a star. I refused to let the hard work I had put in and my dedication to my craft die with me.
My final living thought as a mortal was that of vengeance. The people responsible for my death will pay. Somehow. I clung onto it tightly as my eyes rolled into the back of my skull and my body went limp.
One
A Call
BANDILE NDALA, A SUCCESSFUL playwright and author in days long gone, found himself in an open field – naked as the moment he popped out of his mother’s womb 43 years ago. A cold, driving rain slicked off his body. His teeth were chattering. He looked around, hoping to spot something familiar – a landmark, a sign post, anything to help him figure out where he was. How he got there, he’d try to figure out later. For now, he had to find a way to get home, a journey that starts with knowing your current location. The psychotic episodes had been getting worse. But he never imagined they’d become so bad that they’d cause him to wander off in nothing but his birthday suit.
The call of an owl caused him to turn and look up into a tree covered in darkness. There was something about the empty, tinny quality of the owl’s call that made Bandile nervous.
“Whooo, whoo?”
It sounded like an accusation. In the tree, on one of its skeletal branches that reached out into an endless night, he saw a pair of round, glowing eyes looking down at him. The rest of the owl he could not see; its tar-black feathers blending into the darkness.
The sight caused his blood to run cold. He knew owls to be omens of bad luck. Black owls, he thought, surely must be the devil himself paying a visit.
“Come to me,” he heard a voice say, a woman’s voice.
It was warm and inviting. Irresistible, in fact. He thought it was coming from the owl. Talking owls. He almost laughed out loud, thinking that the cheese had finally well and truly slipped out of his sandwich. But, when the woman repeated herself, it became clear that her voice was coming from somewhere behind the tree.
He felt his body move on its own, manipulated by the woman’s voice.
There, behind the tree, a few steps away, he made out the shadowy figure of a woman with long braids. The owl called once more and, again, he threw his gaze up into the tree. When he looked back at the woman, she was hurtling towards him. He tried to move but was paralysed. He could only watch as she plunged a massive meat cleaver into his chest and pushed it deeper with relish, causing blood to splutter out of his mouth as he struggled to breathe.
Bandile woke up with a start. He and his sheets were soaked in sweat. He rubbed his chest where the knife in the dream had pierced his body. It ached and itched – the sensation of a healing wound. Again. He exhaled. Different night, the same nightmare. The same dull, cleaver-shaped pain below his left collarbone.
It was still night. The full moon slipped between gaps in the blinds and bathed the room in half light. Bandile fumbled for the cellphone he knew was resting next to the pillow on the cold side of the bed, where Zoleka used to sleep. He felt for a moment pangs of longing for her; his wife, his soon-to-be ex-wife.
Three weeks ago, as he ranted and raved in a jail cell at the Hillbrow police station, facing charges of domestic violence, she had packed her things and left – taking with her their two young twins, Luzuko and Funeka, his heaven and earth. The house he returned to after he was granted bail had been emptied of the people and memories that made it a home. The divorce papers on the table punctuated the silence as the new, permanent state of the house.
Phone in hand, Bandile took a deep breath. Zoleka’s departure was for the best. Even he had to admit that. Lately, he had not been himself. Violent outbursts. Long absences where he couldn’t explain to anyone, not even himself, where he had been. The man’s madness had poked holes in his memory of the night he attacked Zoleka. He couldn’t remember what made him want to hurt her.
He closed his eyes, shook the thoughts away and flicked the phone on. 10:34pm. Had he been asleep for only an hour?
Impossible, he thought.
A tiny square envelope at the top of the phone’s screen caught his attention. A notification of a text message. He hadn’t received a single call or SMS from anyone since news of what he did to Zoleka made front-page news. He was damaged goods, a persona non grata in the world of film, TV and theatre. All the people he thought were his friends had been staying clear of him.
Scrolling to his inbox, he opened the message. It was from a number he didn’t recognise.
All it said was: “Cariba Inn. Room 28.”
That’s it. There was no name to give him a clue about who sent it. There wasn’t even a greeting. Could he even be sure it was for him? He was about to ignore it and attempt to return to sleep when he heard her again, the woman from his recurring nightmare.
“Come to me,” she said.
Bandile jumped out of bed and switched on the lights. He looked around the room, adorned with luxuries that he could no longer afford to maintain. There was no one else with him. No doubt about that.
A semi-religious man, the kind who only remembered his Lord and Saviour in times of need, Bandile had been praying about his problems – praying for deliverance. He knew that God worked in mysterious ways. But only figures in Biblical tales, like Noah or Moses, heard the voice of God telling them what to do. Not real-life people in the year 2020.
If you’re hearing voices Anno Domini, you’ve definitely lost the plot, he thought.
“I said … come to me,” the woman said. Her voice was more stern but still pleasant to the ear; harmonious and tempting.
It took every bit of will Bandile had to keep his body from obeying. He pinched himself. It hurt. Whatever. Surely he was still dreaming. A dream within a dream. A lucid dream.
“You’re not dreaming, Bandi, my nunus. In fact, you have just woken up to a new world – a reality beyond your wildest dreams,” the disembodied woman in his room said, replying to his thoughts.
“No,” Bandile snapped, pacing back and forth. He was running through a list of the nearest psychiatric facilities in his mind. That’s where he was convinced he should go – not room 28
at the Cariba Inn.
“Come to me …,” she said, softly, “and I will make your pen sing again.”
The words caused Bandile to stop in his tracks. He’d been struggling for months to choke a decent sentence out of his pen. His study was a mess of papers stained by one still-born story after the other, of mind maps that led to dead ends, character sketches that fell apart.
“This has to be a dream,” he said, aloud.
“Fine,” the voice said, a hint of exasperation peeking through the sweetness. “Have it your way. On my signal you will come to me.”
The snapping of fingers broke the fleeting silence that followed. The sound echoed in Bandile’s brain and cascaded down the rest of his body. Suddenly rendered a marionette on a puppeteer’s strings, Bandile took out his phone to search for the address of the Cariba Inn.
Two
Room 28
BANDILE PARKED NEAR a tall, dull-brown building at the corner of a fruit and veg shop. He was in one the most run-down parts of Vereeniging.
People there lived side by side with factories that spat pollution into the air. Homeless men harassed pockets for spare change. Barely clothed women writhed at street corners in broad daylight, trying to lure their next client to an out-of-view spot to complete the transaction. Drug dealers moved weight in the backstreets as junkies snatched belongings to feed their insatiable cravings.
As terrifying as the scene might have been to outsiders, Bandile appreciated the display – people living gritty lives. It was the fertiliser from which great stories grow. Some of his best, most successful scripts such as that for Ayinamsebenzi Lonto were set in places such as this. The TV drama followed a cast of characters living on the fringes of society in downtown Johannesburg. Each had dreams that viewers of the coveted Monday to Friday 8:30pm peak-hour slot could relate to. Their lives meandered like the Gariep, criss-crossed with each others’ and forced them into ethical dilemmas. Love at odds with fidelity. Hidden truths that once revealed cut like razors. Coveting that came with consequences worse than the 10 plagues of Egypt.
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