Durban Poison

by Ben Trovato

  The fasting starts at 10pm, which is annoying because that’s when my need for feeding and watering begins to peak. Not being able to shovel stuff into myself after 10pm is like loadshedding for the body.

  Weak from hunger and thirst, I wake at the crack of dawn with some kind of wild animal licking what little remains of my face. I wasn’t happy about forfeiting my traditional weekday breakfast of two Bloody Marys and a starter portion of magic mushrooms on toast, but a fast is a fast and the faster I got to the vampires the faster I could end the fast.

  PathCare doesn’t do bookings. First come, first served. Being a gentleman, I stood aside to allow three women through the door ahead of me. Won’t make that mistake again. When my turn came, a nurse with the bedside manner of Genghis Khan told me to roll up my sleeve and make a fist. I rolled up both sleeves and made as if I was going to rabbit punch her in the kidneys, then feigned a roundhouse to the head. I bet she gets that all the time. When she strapped a tourniquet around my arm I wanted to say something witty about heroin but nothing suitable came to mind.

  “You’re going to feel a little prick,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” I said. Right away I saw in her eyes that she had misinterpreted the remark. At best I had a thing for genitally challenged men. At worst I was a kiddie-fiddler. I wanted to explain that I was talking about myself. Should I show her? Given the circumstances, my willy had almost certainly shrunk to the size of an Etruscan shrew.

  Three days later the doctor called with my results. There was an awkward silence. I thought he might be trying not to laugh. After checking that I was still on the line, he rattled off a bunch of numbers that made no sense, before dropping the bombshell about the stroke/heart attack odds. I barely heard a word after that.

  Picking up my palpitations over the phone, he reassured me that as far as odds go for a man my age, 12.7 per cent wasn’t bad at all. And, what’s more, if I did something about my blood pressure and cholesterol, this could come down to eight per cent. I don’t care. That is still too high.

  When it comes to Very Bad Things, I want to be told there is a 0 per cent likelihood of any of them happening. That includes dying. Now all I’ll do for the next decade is wake up every morning and wonder if this is the day the 12.7 per cent comes knocking. This is why I hate maths. Numbers are dictators. Words are democrats. There is wiggle-room with words that you don’t get with numbers.

  Thanks anyway, doc. A man who has sworn an oath to do nothing but good has gone and told me something that will make me worry so much that I’ll have cancer by Thursday and be dead by the weekend.

  THE LOINFRUIT’S BIG FAT BALI WEDDING

  If you have to go to Bali at short notice but lack access to a high-powered boat fitted with supplementary vodka tanks, supersonic stabilisers and three depraved Scandinavian contortionists, you should probably fly. My contortionists were in for repairs so I decided to use Singapore Airlines.

  OR Tambo International Airport is nothing like the man. For a start, it lacks his outward sense of calm and order. Ironic, though, to name an airport after a man whose lexicon included regular use of a word that may not, under pain of imprisonment, be uttered in an airport. For the slow-witted, I’m talking about the word bomb.

  I suppose I could’ve flown South African Airways. It would have been the patriotic thing to do. Then again, not allowing an immigrant family from Uttar Pradesh to ransack our state-owned enterprises would also have been the patriotic thing to do.

  Singapore Airlines is everything that SAA isn’t. It runs on time, gives people free drinks and, unlike the rand, hardly ever crashes. The 10-hour flight to Singapore was a pleasure. The pilot wasn’t even a little bit drunk. I have experienced more turbulence in hotel rooms. And their meals make SAA look like a soup kitchen for homeless war criminals.

  Singapore is one of the many airlines that don’t fly from Durban’s King Shaka International Airport. Hadedas barely fly from King Shaka. Most of them depart from the tree outside my bedroom window at 4.30am. Hadedas have the worst air traffic control in the world, shouting at each other whenever they take off or land. Or even just sit there.

  To get to Singapore Airlines I had to fly from Durban to Johannesburg. I managed to get myself an emergency exit seat by weeping openly at the check-in counter while standing on my tiptoes, which brought my height to around 3 metres. I need extra leg room like a shark needs to keep moving.

  The cabin attendant gave me instructions on what to do in the event of what she coyly described as a forced landing while I pretended to listen. We both knew that in the history of aviation, nobody in my position had ever swung that lever up, kicked the door open and helped his fellow passengers onto the wing.

  The attendant then told me, with a straight face, that in the event of a water landing, I should swim to the front of the plane where I’d find the life vests. So there was a chance we’d come down in the Umgeni River, then? Or maybe Zoo Lake? It was like a triathlon. Fly, swim, crawl to hospital.

  Waiters in an airport bar took me hostage and only released me when they heard my name being called. Weaving off to the gate severely handicapped by a belly distended with beer, I made it just in time.

  “Where were you, sir? We’ve been calling you.”

  “I thought that was the voice of God,” I said.

  This conversation might have taken place in my head. Living alone as I do, a fierce amount of conversations take place in my head.

  It wasn’t long before I was on nodding terms with the onboard medication. But there comes a time on any long-haul flight when the airline treats its passengers as one would a bunch of parrots. They’ve barely fed and watered you when the blinds come down and the lights go off. It’s the equivalent of putting a blanket over a birdcage.

  “More gin and tonic, air slave!”

  “Sir, now is sleepy time, not drinky time.”

  “What? This is an outrage! Drinky time has barely begun and you expect ...”

  “Sir, it is 2am in Singapore. Not drinky time at all.”

  “Rubbish. It’s 6pm and still light outside. Look.” I went to raise the plastic shutter thing.

  “Mr Parrot, do not touch the fittings or we will have you shot.”

  Singapore, you will remember, is the country that almost destroyed Helen Zille’s career. I shudder to think what their airline is capable of doing. Quite frankly, I’m not convinced that Singapore is a country at all. I think it’s just a giant airport with travelators instead of roads, planes instead of trains and sliding glass doors instead of borders. I’ve visited countries smaller than Changi Airport, which appears to have a GDP considerably higher than most African states. Another reason I don’t think Singapore is a real country is their idea of what constitutes crime.

  A teaser emblazoned on the front page of the Singapore Sunday Times screamed, “The ugly side of bike sharing!” I assumed “bike sharing” was a polite euphemism for one or other less-than-salubrious activity. Human trafficking, perhaps. My brain salivating at the idea of receiving a dose of fresh filth, I flipped the paper open. The page-two lead was headlined, “LTA moves against badly parked bikes.” Ramming home the full horror, four photographs showed bicycles parked willy-nilly, some obstructing doorways, others partially blocking a staircase. A few have already been impounded. It was too terrible. I had to bite down hard on my knuckles so as not to cry out at the inhumanity of it all. But, despite the brutally indiscriminate parking of bicycles, Singapore will rebuild. Je suis Singapore.

  To reach my connecting flight to Bali, I had to cross several topographical zones within the Singaporean People’s Republic of Changi. Across the temperate highlands of Duty Free through the megalopolis of pharmacies to the glittering cornucopia of Gucci, I soldiered bravely on. Rebel-controlled roadblocks slowed my progress but, after handing over bottles of water, I was allowed to continue on my way.

  I spent the flight shooting death stares at parents who think it’s somehow acceptable for their ch
ildren to carry on like malfunctioning air-raid sirens.

  Black-gloved gunmen were waiting for me at Denpasar Airport. Were they to release me into the wilds of Bali with my bottle of rum and my bottle of gin, I would quite clearly be unable to resist the urge to violently overthrow the Indonesian government. They gave me a choice.

  “Rum or gin?” said a beautiful combatant with sloe eyes and a quick draw. It was a cruel choice to have to make.

  “Eat prey, love,” I muttered, handing over the gin before walking out into a thick soup of tropical humidity, Australian accents and seven billion motorbikes.

  THE LOINFRUIT’S BIG FAT BALI WEDDING – II

  I am lying on Kuta Beach sweating heavily and pouring beer over my bubbling chest while watching planes come in low over the sea every 10 minutes to land at Bali’s Denpasar Airport, each carrying its ungodly cargo of yawling Aussies, brawling Brazzos and jawling Saffers.

  South Africans party hard when they travel to foreign countries. They are drunk and wrestling the taxi driver for control of the wheel even before leaving the airport parking. Maybe it’s just me. In my defence, he did seem to be going in the wrong direction. I wasn’t aware that everyone in Bali drives in the wrong direction when setting off. Eventually, it all corrects itself. You just have to be patient. I wasn’t being patient. I wanted to surf some of the best waves on the planet. As did half of Australia, a third of Brazil and two North Koreans who looked as if they’d paddled all the way from Pyongyang.

  I’m on the island of the dogs for my son’s wedding. What? That’s not right. I don’t have a son. For a long time I thought I did. Then I watched a programme about parenting and discovered I’d been doing it all wrong. The son I thought I had – the one with the high-pitched voice, girly mannerisms and disturbing penchant for flouncing about in heels and camo skirts – was, in fact, a girl.

  She’s all grown up now and has forgiven me for the terrible things I did to her to get her voice to break when she was 14. Let us not even speak of the nights I dragged her out on pub crawls to teach her to drink and fight like a man.

  “Clive,” I’d say, “drink up so that we may depart this filthy den and disturb the peace as boys have done since the dawn of time. Let us pillage this village!”

  “My name’s not Clive,” she would say, before sashaying out into the night for a little trash talk and some light slapping. He was always rubbish at pillaging. That was a sign right there. But I was blind. Blind to reality. Blind to gender. Blind drunk.

  But that was then and this is now. She’s 28. Or maybe 29. Definitely under 30. I hope so. If I’m wrong, I’m much older than I think I am and that wouldn’t do at all. She’s been living with a Belgian-Namibian bloke for nine years and they’ve decided to get married. Having developed a pathological allergy to marriage, I was devastated.

  “Why can’t you just keep living in sin?” I shouted. She said God would punish me, then we laughed and laughed because she knows there is no god. She got that from me. It might be my greatest accomplishment. Counter-missionaries do incredible work. We are the unsung heroes of our time and deserve government funding.

  Wilting from Bali’s humidity and Singapore Airlines gin, we hired a gold Toyota Kijang with tinted windows and hit the motorbike-infested roads. Wherever we went, people darted us nervous glances and quickly got out of our way. I assume they mistook us for gangster pimps down from Java on a revenge mission.

  The blue-haired loinfruit, Liberty, and her scraggly, bearded, ponytailed, reggae-loving husband-to-be, Laurent, wanted to proceed directly to Ubud in central Bali where the nuptials were happening in a few days’ time.

  “We don’t really need you there right now,” said Laurent.

  “We can drop you at the coast if you like,” said Liberty.

  I’m not very good at gauging when I’m not wanted. For instance, I stayed married for five years longer than necessary in both of my marriages. I am getting better at reading signs and taking hints and there are even times when I understay my welcome.

  She booked me into a one-roomed homestay in Canggu too far from the beach to walk with my surfboard, forcing me to hire a motorbike with board racks and thus dramatically raising the odds of an early exit of the troublesome paterfamilias. I’m sure it wasn’t deliberate.

  My wooden cabin was set in a tropical garden that instantly disappeared from sight the moment I stepped through the door. It’s the Bali way. Everything is perfect apart from one or two oversights. Like forgetting to put windows in the guest accommodation. Or placing the plug sockets on the ceiling.

  The owner kept giving me cold Bintangs and when he decided I’d had enough he handed me the keys to a motorbike and a tiny helmet that gave me Shar-Pei-face.

  “You go old man’s bar,” he said, smiling happily as I veered off the road and into a rice paddy. I wasn’t delighted at the prospect of drowning my jet lag in a bar reserved for geriatrics, but the hard truth is that there really is no country for old men.

  Turned out the bar was called Old Man’s. I don’t know why. I was always the oldest person there by far. The female clientele was abysmally beautiful and the men were okay if chiselled faces and tanned, ripped torsos are your thing. They all looked as if they’d been dipped in vats of cheap floating tattoos that randomly affixed themselves to different body parts.

  A couple of days later the offspring returned to fetch me. Sitting in the back seat was my first ex-wife. I thought Liberty had been joking when she told me earlier that her mother was coming. I thought she was simply trying to scare me to death in the hope of an early life insurance payout.

  “Hello, Gwen,” I said in the tone Seinfeld uses when he greets Newman. We had barely seen or spoken to one another in the last 20 years.

  “I’ve got a bone to pick with you,” she said, lighting a cigarette. Just one? I have two Cambodian killing fields worth of bones to pick. I didn’t say that aloud, obviously. Instead, I put my foot down and declared the holiday to be a bone-free occasion. She seemed to like the new assertive me and playfully rabbit punched me in the kidneys.

  We were joined in the surfing village of Balangan by Ninz and Boontang, Cape Town friends of the bridal couple. Ninz is an obsessive animal lover and within an hour she had the local Bali dogs eating out of her handbag. Boontang, who has a tattoo of their dog on his arm, had brought his board along so we combined forces in a low-key war against the aggro Australian wave hogs, none of whom we could understand, no matter how slowly they shouted at us.

  It can’t be easy coordinating a wedding that involves friends and family flying in from around the world and Liberty was spending a lot of time on her phone. I don’t always recognise when people are stressed because I was born without a stress gland in my brain. So when I delivered one of my legendary one-liners, she deployed her mother’s eyebrows and stalked off. Ten minutes later Laurent came up to me and said I needed to watch what I say. I suppose he was expecting me to lower my eyes, murmur an apology and back away slowly.

  People think it’s only war veterans and acid casualties who have flashbacks. Not true. I lived through a time when vicious brutes like PW Botha tried to tell us what to do, say and write. Okay. I might’ve had a small flashback.

  So there it was. A Mexican standoff in Bali but with buffaloes instead of Mexicans. The young buffalo was challenging the old buffalo for … I don’t know what buffalos challenge each other for. Forget I even mentioned buffalos. They probably shag their own relatives. Beasts.

  But something ancient was happening as we stood there, eyeball to eyeball, the smell of imminent violence hanging in the tropical air. He was defending his woman. But she was also my daughter. I had known her since birth. I had been the defender, the protector, the provider. I gave her food and clothes and a love of books. I taught her how to drink and drive before she could even walk.

  You don’t have this trouble with cars. You sign a transfer of ownership and that’s it. For years you might think fondly of that car and the places you�
��ve been together, but it’s no longer your car or your responsibility.

  I’m not saying I think of my daughter as a car. That would be ridiculous. She doesn’t even have a licence. But, as Laurent made it very clear, he’d take it from there.

  Not so fast, sonny. In three days’ time, I get to walk Liberty down the aisle and give her away. No lobola, no charge. Until then, I’m ready to go the full 10 rounds.

  THE LOINFRUIT’S BIG FAT BALI WEDDING – III

  “Are you crying?” asked the barman. What? No, of course not. Or was I? Perhaps I had reached the point where I went about weeping in public without realising it. There is certainly enough savagery in the world to warrant it. Then it occurred to me that my sight-balls were more likely swollen and bloodshot from a three-hour surf at Canggu’s Batu Bolong Beach.

  I had been complaining that my sight was severely compromised by an attack of river blindness but was told it was more likely the consequence of drinking non-government-approved arak. Which might explain why I missed a deadline that fell awkwardly on the eve of my daughter’s wedding. Many things fell that night. I, however, was not among them, having previously reassured my loinfruit that I would remain on my feet and coherent for the duration of the nuptials. I walked her down the garden path – this was an al fresco aisle-free wedding – without once stopping to throw up. Let none dare say I am a bad father.

  It was a beautiful ceremony conducted by the Almost Reverend Redeye Riaan, who moonlights in Cape Town as a rock/blues musician. I don’t know if he has married any other people. Around midnight I found him lurking on the edge of the jungle and asked for his credentials. He, in turn, asked for mine. It was the kind of late-night deadlock that might have ended in violence or, worse, an intense philosophical debate. We hugged and went back to the party for cocktails.