There is a particular moment, when the sky goes coral pink and the breaking surf is chalk-blue, almost fluorescent in the fading light. And then each incoming swell feels as if it is rolling over my body, just under the skin, from the soles of my feet all the way to my fingernails, rolling out over the quick, making me want to reach out my fingers and touch. Although I am a controlled man, I am not immune to these things.
Controlled, that’s another word I’ve heard people – my workmates – use to describe me. I’m a senior copywriter, moderately good at my job; good at controlling words, certainly. Words for pictures of sunsets, often with cars or couples in front of them. But I grope after language to describe the feelings I experience on my evening walks, the light in the air and on the sea. This pleases me: that some things remain beyond my grasp. That they cannot be rendered down.
Perhaps this is why I have no ambition. I’ve held the same position at the same agency for fifteen years and have no desire for anything greater, for a managerial position, even as the new hires are promoted around me. Such things, I know, could never fulfil my more obscure longings. I’m happy to run in place.
There are always a lot of people moving up and down the promenade: smooth-skinned models looping along in Rollerblades too heavy for their frail ankles; the old woman who sits on the same bench every evening to feed the pigeons; cheerful ladies in tracksuits, trying to shift a kilogram or two; resolute athletes with corded thighs. Dog-walkers and drug-dealers and beggars, and lovers in each other’s arms as they watch the sun go down. Some of them I have seen every other evening for the past three years, which is how long I’ve been taking my promenade now. Others are new. Recently I’ve started to feel I recognise individual seagulls along the route, although this is surely my imagination.
One evening, a young man comes past me, sweating and steaming in a cloud of musk. Although covered up in a tracksuit, his body is obviously muscular; not the smooth, inflated-looking muscles that you see on some of the gym boys, not well-fed recreational beef, but the hard, functional build of someone who works with his body for a living. Shorter than me, but strong. He jogs fast and purposefully.
I notice him again a few days later, and from then on he intersects regularly with my evening promenade, three times a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, Saturdays. I see him going only the one way. He must loop back, as I do; but his circuit is clearly far more expansive and demanding than my own. Time-wise, he is rigid. I always pass him on my outbound trip, and always, it seems, at exactly the same place: just opposite the traffic lights where I pause to do my stretches. He waits to cross the road there, bouncing on his toes, swivelling his torso aggressively left and right. Perhaps he’s heading for the gym.
Always dressed in bright, deep colours, I notice; he must have half a dozen different tracksuits, in pillar-box red, racing green, midnight blue. (These phrases come to me involuntarily.) He always wears the complete assemblage, matched top and pants, which is quite formal – never casual in a T-shirt. A white towel is looped around his neck and sometimes he grasps its ends as he waits at the traffic lights, pulling it against the back of his dark neck. A strong, almost cuboidal block of a jaw. I think he must be a boxer. Something in the way he moves, in the build. Or maybe it’s just the way he holds his fists, loosely clenched, that gives me this idea.
My certainty about his occupation grows. Who but a professional athlete would need to train so often and so hard, swathed in towel and sweat-dark tracksuit? His arms are bulkier than a long-distance runner’s would need to be, he is light on his feet with a dancing stride, and there’s a kind of sprightly aggression in his movements. Enormous hands, for his height. They make me self-conscious about my own flushed fists.
Two men, changeless, beating the same if opposite route; it is comforting. I’ve read about boxers’ battles to keep their weight at certain limits, and I imagine that we are caught in the same kind of stasis. Like me, he is fighting to keep his body where it is – although, to be sure, his standard is more exacting.
After a while we start to nod to each other, cautiously. To test my boxing theory, one day I put up my fists – not sure, really, what I intend. He balls his and twitches them towards his chin. No smile, though. It feels tenuous, the moment: me with fists raised, unsure if this is a playful act.
Up close, I see the imperfections – the damaged skin of his brows, the way the scarring seems to have resulted in the loss of eyebrows. I notice that his nose looks broken, his earlobes thick. (Are those cauliflower ears?) Despite this coarsening of the features, he has an appealing face, set in an expression of youthful resolution, lit on one side by the setting sun.
It becomes a jokey ritual, a greeting every time we pass. The lifted hands in imaginary gloves. At least, I think it’s a joke. It grows from there.
One evening, when we come face to face, he and I do that little step-step dance that happens when two people are walking straight into each other: both to the same side and then both back again. I smile. His fists come up and this time he pauses to spar with me. I flinch – and then I know I’m right: only a pro could direct such a sparkling combination of quick almost-touches to my ribs, my jaw, my nose. The huge fists lunge at me, snap back; so close, I feel a tickle of warm air on my face, and smell his sweat. I raise my hands to parry.
And after that it happens every time: each evening we do the little two-step dance, and spend a few moments trading phantom blows. A smile never crosses his face, as if the scars somehow prevent it. But at the end, just before he skips to the side and jogs on, he’ll give me a look and tip his chin up in brief and surely humorous acknowledgement.
A month passes, two. The woman who feeds the birds looks increasingly fragile, until I start to worry that she’ll be overpowered by the sturdy pigeons bickering around her; and then one day she is gone. Shortly thereafter, I see the pigeons have constructed another old woman in their midst. The couples part and reconfigure. But the boxer and I remain the same, locked in our pattern, running and standing still.
Other people loop in other cycles around us, stitching up the ends of their days with a quick up-and-down along the water’s edge. I think of ants, crawling in opposing circles; clockwise ants every now and then touching mouthparts with their anticlockwise comrades, passing cryptic messages. Some promenaders I will doubtless never meet, caught as we are in orbits that never intersect. But the boxer and I are in sync.
My days pass mildly; I have other routines. The promenade is not my only circular occupation. I sit on Sunday afternoons in the flat and read the newspaper. I go out to buy myself coffee and croissants. I go to work, where I produce copy about faster, stronger, younger. When I hear my own words on TV, I don’t remember ever writing them.
Sitting in my padded swivel chair before my computer station, hands poised to tap the keys, I am trapped in stillness. There is a strong desire to jump up and swing my arms, to dispel this immobility. But I stay where I am and the spasm passes. My colleagues at the other workstations do not notice this fleeting turmoil, do not see that I have paused in my typing to contemplate for a moment some grand gesture. I flex my hands, let them drop mildly back to the keyboard. My fingers renew their automatic labour.
Mondays, Wednesday, Saturdays. We never speak, but our greetings are progressively more familiar. In our small, intense interactions I notice things in great detail: the fact that his irises are black, fading from that dark centre to amber rims. A chipped tooth in his slightly open mouth.
Our sparring becomes elaborate. I think he might be teaching me to box. It’s all very controlled, but of course there is also a little thrill of fear. Huge fists in your face, what can you do but imagine those hands rubbing out your features, smearing your nose, forcing your teeth into your mouth? That’s never happened to me of course, but I can imagine the very specific sensations: nose-break pain, tooth-shatter pain, taste of blood. I do not know exactly what the mock-blows signify – violence or camaraderie. Each thrust has the potential to explode, i
s centimetres from rocketing into my face, from crushing my chest. I can imagine receiving such blows far more easily than I can see myself delivering them. I try to picture pushing my hand all the way, sticking it between the big fists to press against that jaw. Impossible.
Sometimes, trotting on after our shadow-play, I am trembling slightly, feeling the sting of invisible gloves on my body, the smack of fists. I think of the phrase glass jaw. Compared to his stony features, I am all crystal.
One Wednesday afternoon I stay home from work with a cold. I switch on the TV at some unusual hour, to catch the afternoon news: SABC2 or 3, which I would not normally watch. And I see him, I am sure it is him, under the bright lights of the ring, in shiny redand-white shorts, his knuckles encased in bulbous mitts like cartoon hands. His lips are distended by a gum guard, and he looks smaller with his top off, but I know him by his movements: the sideways skip and jump, fists flung out in that dancing rhythm. He and his opponent in blue are both little terrier-men – is it featherweight? – but they are pure wire-hard muscle, shiny brown with sweat. I don’t catch his name over the dinging bell, the shouts of the crowd; and anyway, the commentary is in another language.
I lean forward, face close to the screen. It only lasts a couple of rounds. The one small, hard man drills the other to the floor with sweat-spraying strokes. I feel each blow as a twitch in my upper arms. And then it is over: blue lies flat on his back, toes up and out; my boxer’s hands are raised above his head in victory. Blood streaming from his brow.
Only after the ads come on do I relax my hands and let myself lean backwards on the couch.
He is absent from the promenade for a week. When he reappears, I am warier of him, almost ducking away from his shadow-strokes, but he is too skilful to touch me. Often I think about speaking to him, but my mouth is dry, and he is exercising so hard, so earnestly; I don’t want to break his concentration.
I am not eloquent here, in this conversation of bodies. Still, I have come to depend on these playful altercations, these little knockabouts in which neither one of us falls to the ground.
Today, for the first time in months, my routine is broken. What is it that delays me? A foolish thing. A flutter of wings in my chest as I’m putting on my shoes, a kind of rushing. Something to startle a man of my age. I have to sit for a few moments, gathering myself. Only fifty-four. I have had no trouble before now. I eat well; my life does not have unusual stresses. I exercise.
As a result, I am ten minutes late in getting away. Maybe twelve. I don’t check the exact time of my leaving, nor do I feel the need to hurry especially, to catch up. I am rigid in my habits, but not to that degree. The heart flutter has upset me and I’m not thinking of anything else. I set out cautiously.
I do not think of the boxer, of how I have disrupted the pattern of our meetings. I do not consider that my delay will in turn mean that he is not delayed. His circuit from unknown origin to unknown destination will not, now, be paused for our customary sparring. He will not lose that five or ten seconds, and thus will cross the road five or ten seconds sooner. I do not think of these things, and if I did I would not see the significance.
I feel old and tired and a little sick; for once I do not feel like the bracing sea air, the spray, the demanding sunset light. I do not feel like meeting the radiant, youthful figure of the boxer, holding up his hands.
Ten minutes, maybe twelve. Long enough for it all to be over by the time I reach the stretch beyond the children’s swings, coming up to the traffic lights. I see the small crowd ahead. A car has stopped in the road, slewed at a shocked angle, windscreen spiderwebbed. People stand with their heads down, rapt, staring at something at their centre. An ambulance pulls up. I lengthen my stride.
As I come alongside I see only people’s backs. I push my way through. Cooling flesh slicked with sunscreen and sweat, joggers and walkers. A couple of dogs twisting their leashes around their owners’ legs, weaving a mesh between me and what lies on the pavement. I step over crossed leashes, squeeze between shoulders.
The boxer is lying on his back, hands at his sides, legs spread, toes pointed up and away from each other. A dachshund sniffs at his bright white trainers. There is blood. My hands, the backs of my hands, tingle as if they have just been slapped. My knuckles tingle. My face aches. I back away.
I walk on. The ambulance drives past me, but it goes slowly with no siren or lights flashing. I walk and walk; something has reset my clock and I no longer know when to turn around. On beyond the café, on along the sea wall, beyond the phones, on until the path ends at the wall of the marina and I can go no more; otherwise I might walk for ever. Stepping up to the wall that blocks my path, I punch it with my left hand. Not hard, only enough to hurt my knuckles, not to bloody them; I wouldn’t know how to hit that hard. I do it just once, then stand staring at the concrete for a moment before turning away.
I don’t go back along the promenade. Instead I cross the road to the other side, towards the shops and hotels and away from the sea. The ocean is gentle and tired this evening. The incoming and outgoing waves seem to be confirming something, some truth about tides turning, time passing. Such flat phrases for that eternal suffering rhythm; but this is the best I can do.
I walk home a different way, through back streets. It takes me a long time. I stop halfway at a random bistro and order coffee, decaf for the heart, and pick up the newspaper I failed to buy earlier. I don’t know where I am in the day. I read the newspaper front to back, the sports pages and the classifieds and the obituaries. Then at last I continue home along an unfamiliar route. I can’t avoid glimpsing, in a broken band down the steep side streets, the soft, luminous colour that the sea is generating. I can feel that brightness in the corner of my eye, but here where I am walking the world is darker. I’m cold in my T-shirt.
As I pass the window of the Woolworths on the corner, it is old, vain habit that makes me glance into the silvered glass. And I see clearly that age has come to me at last: decades, it seems, since this morning. The expensive walking clothes hang loose. And I know that from now on the years, which never burdened me before, will gather on my body, heavier and heavier in the life that remains. Time has started up again, speeding me down.
I step away from the glass and close my eyes. I raise up the boxer in my mind. Lifting my hands to my chest, I pick up the pace, one-two, one-two, elbows out. Through the evening streets, I complete my promenade.
Poison
Lynn had almost made it to the petrol station when her old Toyota ran dry on the highway. Lucky me, she thought as she pulled up onto the verge, seeing the red and yellow flags ahead, the logo on the tall facade. But it was hopeless, she realised as soon as she saw the pile-up of cars on the forecourt. A man in blue overalls caught her eye and made a throat-slitting gesture with the side of his hand as she came walking up: no petrol here either.
There were twenty-odd stranded people, sitting in their cars or leaning against them. They glanced at her without expression before turning their eyes again towards the distant city. In a minibus taxi off to one side, a few travellers sat stiffly, bags on laps. Everyone was quiet, staring down the highway, back at what they’d all been driving away from.
An oily cloud hung over Cape Town, concealing Devil’s Peak. It might have been a summer fire, except it was so black, so large. Even as they watched, it boiled up taller and taller into the sky, a plume twice as high as the mountain, leaning towards them like an evil genie.
As afternoon approached, the traffic thinned. Each time a car drew up, the little ceremony was the same: the crowd’s eyes switching to the new arrival, the overalled man slicing his throat, the moment of blankness and then comprehension, eyes turning away. Some of the drivers just stood there, looking accusingly at the petrol pumps; others got back into their cars and sat for a while with their hands on the steering wheels, waiting for something to come to them. One man started up his BMW again immediately and headed off, only to coast to a halt a few hundred metres down t
he drag. He didn’t even bother to pull over. Another car came in pushed by three sweating black men. Their forearms were pumped from exertion and they stood for a while with their hands hanging at their sides, exchanging words in Xhosa with the petrol attendants. There was no traffic at all going into the city.
Over the previous two days, TV news had shown pictures of the N1 and N2 jam-packed for fifty kilometres out of town. It had taken a day for most people to realise the seriousness of the explosion; then everybody who could get out had done so. Now, Lynn supposed, lack of petrol was trapping people in town. She herself had left it terribly late, despite all the warnings. It was typical; she struggled to get things together. The first night she’d got drunk with friends. They’d sat up late in front of the TV, watching the unfolding news. The second night, she’d done the same, alone. On the morning of this, the third, day, she’d woken up with a burning in the back of her throat so horrible that she understood it was no hangover, and that she had to move. By then, everybody she knew had already left.
People were growing fractious, splitting into tribes. The petrol attendants and the car pushers stood around the taxi. The attendants’ body language was ostentatiously off-duty – ignoring the crowd, attending to their own emergency. One, a woman, bent her head into the taxi and addressed the driver in a low voice. He and the gaardjie were the only people who seemed relaxed; both were slouched low on the front seats, the driver’s baseball cap tilted over his eyes. On the other side of the forecourt was a large Afrikaner family group that seemed to have been travelling in convoy: mother, father, a couple of substantial aunts and uncles, half a dozen blonde kids of different sizes. They had set up camp, cooler bags and folding chairs gathered around them. On their skins, Lynn could see speckles of black grime; everybody coming out of the city had picked up a coating of foul stuff, but on the white people it showed up worse. A group of what looked like students – tattoos, dreadlocks – sat in a silent line along the concrete base of the petrol pumps. One, a dark, barefoot girl with messy black hair down her back, kept springing to her feet and walking out into the road, swivelling this way and that with hands clamped in her armpits, then striding back. She reminded Lynn of herself, ten years earlier. Skinny, impatient. A fit-looking man in a tracksuit hopped out of a huge silver bakkie with Adil’s IT Bonanza on its door and started pacing alertly back and forth. Eventually the man – Adil himself? – went over to the family group, squatted on his haunches and conferred.
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