Durban Poison

by Ben Trovato

  Luckily I had an ace up my sleeve. En route, I’d stopped at the mall and gone to an optician for an eye test. I passed with flying colours. Well, flying enough. That test involved reading half a dozen letters on the back of her door (a test that has been in use since 500BC) and another test involving peripheral vision. That was my best result. One doesn’t survive two marriages without possessing excellent peripheral vision.

  Somehow, an optician’s eye test outranks a government eye test. An admission that certain things are best left in the hands of the private sector doesn’t come along that often. If only it applied to more things. Like the economy.

  So I now have a temporary driver’s licence valid for six months. Presumably I will at some point get a message that my permanent licence is ready for collection. I will pick it up and go off to celebrate at The Vic, where the card will once more fall from my pocket and eventually be picked up by some cheerful punter and used to chop a line in the bogs.

  THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE BACHELOR

  Eating is a drag when you’re single. I think it’s mainly because the consciously uncoupled lose interest. Feeding time rolls around at the end of the day, every day, and, quite frankly, we just can’t be bothered after a while. So we fill up on beer or heroin. This is why single men are either skinny, obese or dead.

  I get the same feeling at the end of the day as I do when my car’s fuel light comes on. Do I really have to find a shop/garage to buy food/petrol to put in my stomach/tank? It’s a hassle I can do without. At least with a car you only have to fill up every few weeks. I’d like to be able to do the same with my body. Hang on. Let me check something. Hey! It’s possible. An Indian rights activist known as the Iron Lady of Manipur was on a hunger strike for 16 years. No, wait. She was force-fed through a tube in her nose. That doesn’t sound like much fun at all, although my dentist assured me this week that most of your taste buds are in your nose. I suspect he was lying through his perfect teeth, otherwise you’d have top-end restaurants offering to pipe your meals through your schnoz for maximum enjoyment. Women would go mad for it. They’d be able to eat and talk at the same time.

  I keep coming across stories warning that single people are doomed to die earlier than those with partners. Oh, yes. Death is stalking us lone sharks. And it comes in many guises. Poor diet. Drinking. Operating heavy machinery while drinking. Driving while drinking. Eating badly while drinking and operating heavy machinery. And now, loneliness. In case we weren’t miserable enough about being alone, Dr Richard Schwartz, a Cambridge psychiatrist, and his wife, Dr Jacqueline Olds, have gone out of their way to tell us that it’s also going to kill us.

  It’s not clear if he was quoting Dr Schwartz or veering off on a drunken frolic of his own, but the Boston Globe’s Billy Baker wrote, “Loneliness has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and the progression of Alzheimer’s. One study found that it can be as much of a long-term risk factor as smoking.”

  Yes, I can see how sitting on my own on the veranda with my feet up not smoking cigarettes or being shouted at by an angry women is shortening my lifespan. Sure, I get the odd twinge in my heart, but only when I think of past wives. And I pretty much only forget things when my brain becomes full and I need to make room for new stuff.

  I think food is killing us a lot quicker than loneliness. The longer we go without a partner, the more rubbish we eat. Also, the more rubbish we talk. It’s a vicious circle designed to leave us hopelessly incompatible with little more than cheeseburgers and women who quote from The Secret.

  In the hope of staving off a premature death, I went on a mission to buy healthy food. I have considered exercise, of course. That’s always the first port of call. But there was a piece in the paper about Virgin Active’s latest research. The introduction said that many women between the ages of 25 and 34 would rather look slim and toned in their holiday photos than be fit enough to run a marathon. I don’t know what this means. If I was slim and toned, I could run marathons all day long. I wouldn’t, though, because I’d be in a bar trying to impress women with my slim, toned body.

  The story quoted a fitness expert who ran through what you should be capable of achieving, from your 20s to your 70s. In my age bracket, you should be able to “Run at a moderate pace for 60 seconds without stopping”. I reckon I could do that, but I’d need some kind of incentive or have a Dobermann or policeman chasing me.

  “Do five burpees without stopping.” Give me a yard of ale and I can burpee the national anthem. Next.

  “Lower yourself into a cross-legged position without using your hands, then return to standing.” Don’t be ridiculous. I have only ever seen children, yoga instructors and very stoned people capable of doing this.

  So I went to the nearest health shop – Food Lover’s Market. I used to go to Woolworths but it’s another 200 metres down the mall and I can’t risk the extra distance. Not with being single and on the verge of a stroke.

  It was Whammy Wednesday. I missed Manic Monday and Trippy Tuesday. It seemed to be pretty random. Buy a gem squash and get four watermelons free. Buy a box of mangoes and get a banana. Two crates of peaches and take the cashier home. I don’t know. It was all written on blackboards and something terrible must have happened to me at school because I can’t look at blackboards for too long.

  There was 500 millilitres of virgin olive oil which even I know is better for you than the 6 litres of sunflower oil for the same price. On closer inspection, I saw the olive oil is produced in South Africa. Look, you won’t find a more patriotic person than me, but I am wary of anything produced in South Africa apart from biltong and cannabis. Under ingredients it said, “Vegetable oil (olive fruit).” What? How do you get vegetable oil from a fruit? What is an olive? What am I? Who are you? Why is the universe expanding? When will the sun die? It was all too much and I had to sit down in the nut section for a bit.

  A man came along and asked the nut lady, “Do you know what donkey carrots are?” It seemed to be an odd question to ask the nut lady. She shook her head slowly and edged behind the macadamias. I got up and bought a massive amount of heavily salted cashews and a kilo of Smack on the Bum nuts, which, upon application of my reading glasses, turned out to be Snack on the Run nuts. She didn’t mind. Her eyes suggested her brain was still processing donkey carrots.

  I wandered deeper into this cave that wasn’t Woolworths and never sold handy microwaveable meals that would help single men die sooner. The vegetable section is terrifying. Sweet potatoes in three colours. There’s nothing sweet about the madumbi. It’s a blunt instrument. The rural poor regularly use it to bludgeon each other to death.

  Then the ginger. Oh dear god, the hideously disfigured ginger. It belongs in a home for disabled vegetables. At the very least, screen it off so that sensitive shoppers are spared having to gaze upon its mutilated limbs.

  And what is it with red, green and yellow peppers? Pick a colour, guys. You all taste the same.

  Nestling up against the pretentious peppers is the garlic. Plump, white and wanton. Take my cloves off, they whisper as you pass. No. I shan’t. Get thee behind me, devil veg.

  I liked the fish section. There was a piece of dorado resting on ice for R5. There isn’t much you can get for that kind of money and it’s reassuring to know that you can walk into Food Lover’s Market with a five-rand coin and walk out with a sliver of dorado. You could braai it in the parking lot over your lighter.

  There’s also wine for R20 a bottle in case you want something to wash the dorado down and hasten your departure from this mortal coil. Inexplicably, you aren’t allowed to buy any wine before 9am or after 6pm or on Sundays, which are the only times you ever really need wine.

  They also sell moisturising cream made from buchu. It makes you smell like fynbos and once or twice a year you burst into flame. When it comes to rejuvenation, it’s a small price to pay.

  The best thing about Food Lover’s is that they have loads of tills. Twenty in this
shop. However, this being South Africa, seven tellers are off sick, five are on their smoke break, two are on leave and one is in the back being treated for ginger-related post-traumatic stress disorder.

  In the end, I bought nothing but nuts. Cooking is beyond me at this point. I might need to rethink this business of being single. Winter is coming and I’m going to need food and warmth. Both are conveniently provided by women, who apparently also help stave off heart attacks and Alzheimer’s.

  I’m in the process of wrapping up the remains of my second marriage and can’t wait to get started on my third. I’m looking increasingly like a cross between Bob Geldof and Nick Nolte and if I leave it much longer, I doubt I will be able to find a woman prepared to do anything at all for me without a sizeable down payment.

  LOCAL COLUMNIST LISTED AS FLIGHT RISK

  On International Migratory Bird Day, I speak for the indigenous bird community when I say we’re happy to see the back of those annoying ingrates. I have never seen such arrogance and entitlement. Disrespecting international borders, they come over here every summer, exploit our good weather and do absolutely nothing to uplift the local economy.

  I’m sorry, but it’s just not good enough to fly in on a balmy Tuesday in October and start shouting about your brilliant sense of direction when some of us struggle to find our way out of shopping malls. We won’t even speak of the flitting about hither and yon in the hope that someone will catch a glimpse of your florid undercarriage and cry out in delight.

  Who do they think they are? They come from dinosaurs, for god’s sake. They’re pterodactyls. Sure, they have a better attitude, but only because they know that if they started snatching our children, we wouldn’t hesitate to make them extinct. Like we did with the pterodactyls.

  Then, at the first sign of a chill in the air, they close their nests and bugger off to somewhere warmer without so much as a thank you. I spent the entire summer throwing my bread and spilling my seed into the garden and making sure the little bastards had water to bath their filthy lice-infested bodies.

  Living alone as I do, they were the only friends I had. I was even learning their language. Do you think they ever bothered to learn mine? Of course not. They are like the British who spend hundreds of winters on the Costa del Sol and still the only Spanish they know is, “Una mas cerveza and a steak, egg and chips, pronto Tonto.”

  I’m not asking for a debate on Rabelaisian architecture – quite frankly, I’m not sure Rabelais was an architect at all – but a simple good morning would have been nice. There was a bird who appeared on the telephone wire at sunset who had a lot to say. He’s gone, now. Probably to the Canary Islands, where, if there’s any justice in this world, he won’t be allowed in because he’s not a canary. I suppose there’s a chance he is a local and can’t afford to migrate, in which case his sudden disappearance is quite likely linked to the neighbour’s cat.

  I prefer to think he was concerned about my wellbeing and advising me to leave posthaste because winter was drawing dangerously near.

  “But where should I go?” I shouted into the darkling night.

  “Durban,” he tweeted. It’s true. He has a Twitter account. All birds do. They’ve just learnt not to follow anyone after that nasty business with Alfred Hitchcock when nobody got paid even though they totally carried the movie.

  My feathered friend had been with me for most of the summer, arriving at dusk every day to see that I was okay. Or, more likely, to gloat. If I could fly, I would so gloat at creatures that couldn’t.

  He saw my living conditions and must have known I couldn’t afford to migrate to the warmer breeding grounds in the north. He wasn’t even sure I was capable of breeding at all. Nor am I, quite frankly.

  I had already been thinking about migrating to Durban, so please don’t assume that I take my instructions from birds. That would be mad. Unless, of course, it’s crows. You’d be a reckless fool to ignore advice dispensed by crows.

  And so it was that on International Migratory Bird Day I fled my shack ahead of looming frontal attacks by wild arctic storms and clawless otters crazed from the cold. I snuck through the crippled Kommetjie milkwoods under cover of darkness and folded myself into the Subaru, hitting the road at 6.15am, the earliest recorded motorised departure in human history.

  Apparently it wasn’t. Apparently there are other people on the road at this godless hour. Not one or two, either. Hundreds. Thousands. The entire M3 was backed up for 30 kilometres. It was still night. I wasn’t even able to make out the occupants of the other cars. They could have been flightless birds – stoned ostriches behind the wheel with hysterical penguins gibbering in the back seat – all desperate to migrate to Durban. Boots stuffed with illegal emus and cassowaries who came over by boat but lost their money gambling and can’t get back to Australia or wherever the hell they come from.

  What a terrible world this is becoming. I want you here by 8am. But sir, the taxis are on strike, the buses aren’t running, the trains are burning, the roads are jammed, the robots are out, a drunk pelican drove into me … I don’t care. 8am or you’re fired.

  We need another industrial revolution but with a lot less emphasis on the industrial. The original idea was eight hours’ work, eight hours’ play and eight hours’ sleep. Heavy traffic, exploitative bosses, watered-down tequila and barking dogs have screwed with this formula.

  Anyway. I don’t care. I am presently in a bar in Jeffreys Bay drinking gallons of The Bird Lager. It’s made by a mob of east-coast reprobates at Poison City Brewing. I see it as part of the essential refuelling process, much like what the red-faced warblers do when they stop off in Morocco for a hit on the hash pipe before shacking up with those cute Portuguese birds on the Algarve.

  Besides, one doesn’t simply spend summer in Cape Town and return to Durban in winter without stopping off in Jeffreys Bay to acclimatise. By acclimatise, I obviously mean surf and drink and gird one’s loins for the hell run through the Transkei. I can’t call it the Eastern Cape because it doesn’t behave like a normal province. There’s no corruption because the entire budget is stolen within minutes of it being allocated. The traffic cops are trained in new and unusual methods of soliciting bribes – “Sorry, sir. On this section of road, you are forbidden from wearing seat belts.” Dogs run into the street hoping to be put out of their misery.

  Look, the notion of spending summers in Cape Town and winters in Durban appeals to me on a deep and primal level. So don’t call me a swallow. Swallows are people who have a home in London and another in Hermanus. Swallows are wealthy and generally retired. I’m neither, as evidenced by the fact that you’re reading this.

  It’s quite simple, really. After spending 17 winters in Cape Town, nine of them while married, I never again want to be cold.

  THE HUMAN BODY SHOULD COME WITH SPARE RIBS

  I am going to become one of those people who, upon being asked, “How are you?”, will pin you down, at gunpoint if necessary, and tell you in explicit detail. I might even use sketches and photographs to make sure you get the full picture.

  It is perhaps fortunate, then, that I am not given to long, lingering illnesses. Get in, get sick, get out. That’s my motto. Truth is, I don’t suffer much from poor health at all. I do, however, suffer from accidents. I have fallen into rivers and off mountains and been hit by everything from cars to bouncers.

  This is why I am not terribly surprised to find myself with three fractured ribs. Disappointed, yes. Filled with self-loathing, absolutely. But not surprised.

  Chest injuries were furthest from my mind when a friend called and suggested I come around for dinner and other experiments. He fancies himself as something of an amateur scientist. You know the type. Has to understand how everything works. Was always blowing up the school laboratory. Except in this case, it wasn’t his school. Also, it was 3am. And he’d just turned 38.

  Dinner was an experiment drawing heavily on his dangerously limited knowledge of plants, liquids and animals and how they r
eact under certain conditions. He always insists on full audience participation and usually has his guests sign an indemnity form. He used my form to help start the braai.

  The problem with homegrown scientists is that they don’t know when to stop. I had a bad feeling about the final experiment of the evening but he shouted me down. “What can go wrong?” he shouted. Oh, I don’t know, I could’ve said. One of us might end up with, say, fractured ribs?

  The body’s hematic system is composed of blood and the vessels that carry it through the body. That Friday night, at approximately 11.45pm, our hematic systems were awash with water, calcium, globulin, gin, glucose, tequila, potassium, beer, sodium and brandy. The introduction of tetrahydrocannabinol into bloodstreams already heavily contaminated with unstable toxicants was going to be a fascinating experiment. No, of course it wasn’t. It was an appalling idea from the start.

  I don’t know at what point during my departure I decided to dispense with the stairs and simply glide effortlessly to my car. Author Douglas Adams said, “The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” I clearly have a lot of learning to do.

  I woke up in the morning paralysed with pain and waited to die. That didn’t happen. By Sunday I was starting to get hungry. Since the hospital was next to the shops, it made sense to stop off there first. I didn’t want to spend a fortune at Woolworths only to be told there’s a good chance I’d expire before the beef lasagne.

  Sunday is a bad day to seek medical attention. Or anything, really. Everyone has the Sunday Fear and nobody is interested in your problems. I staggered into casualty clutching my chest and moaning with every step. This, in the eyes of the interested observer, would appear to be a man in the throes of cardiac arrest. In the absence of interested observers, I was given a form to fill in and told to take a seat.