“Do you know what the thing is, Kabelo dear? I neglected to see that it was time for olive oil! Do you see my mistake? I fucking, stupidly, thought we could talk about me. But no, it was time for olive fucking oil.”
“Shit man, I’m so sorry.”
He picked up a cigarette, fingers trembling, and lit.
“Do your parents know?”
A picture of both my parents came to mind and now I laughed bitterly. “It’s not the sort of thing . . . well, where I come from, it’s not the sort of thing you say.”
“Apparently not where I come from either.” His eyes closed and he curled up in the chair with his arms around his knees. Not unlike an infant.
I’m not sure what happened next exactly. Two of Rodney’s friends arrived, and shortly afterwards I decided I would leave. They were friends I didn’t particularly like, their noses were always turned up, they never looked you in the eye and were never sober.
It wasn’t long before they were supplying him with a bag of coke and another bag of pills. I got worried and said, “Don’t you guys think that’s too much?” They snorted the coke and sneered at me and my question. I hesitated, trying to catch Rodney’s attention. His feet were in the water, his hand rubbing off a stream of blood from his nose. I needed to get out of there.
I started walking towards the house and out through the garage. I don’t think Rodney heard me when I said, “Bye,” and I hurried out as if I were in danger. I thought I’d come back, see how he was doing. But there were ugly scowls on those guys’ faces. I ran, I suppose. It was cowardly, but that’s what I did. I kept going past the large houses and down the winding roads until I was down on the main strip and across the beach, hoping to find a cab back to campus.
Things were going dangerously off track, I thought. I was doing too much of this and not enough of school. I was falling behind. The last thing I wanted was to be on the front page of the papers, lone Black guy in a house full of drugs.
I could see what I was turning into; and even if the thought of going back to work with my father was painful, I still wanted to finish my degree. I still wanted to have good options, be able to go and stay where I chose and live the way I wanted, as much as that was possible. I could do that with a degree. Then of course there was the thought of both my parents being disappointed if I failed and got excluded from varsity. That, I couldn’t bear. It was a lot. I had to leave Cape Town, it wasn’t working anymore.
In the following weeks and months, I immersed myself in my work while I thought of what I would do next. I stopped seeing Rodney—which would come back to haunt me but wasn’t completely out of character when I think about it now. News of him being in the hospital didn’t surprise me. Talk amongst medical students about how he had nearly overdosed came to me days later and I looked the other way, glad he was alive but also refusing to bear the guilt and shame of my part in that last day. I had now separated myself from him. In being so practiced at putting my many different selves in different compartments, I’m embarrassed to say it wasn’t difficult. Even though he was such a good friend. By then I had learned to let go of bigger things.
I started running, as always. Every day I thought of ways to convince my parents to let me switch to Durban and in the end they didn’t need much convincing. I spoke to my father first, while I was at home one year after a particularly lonely stretch. We were sitting in his office and he told me about his latest concerns: breastfeeding mothers who preferred formula, an aging population, younger patients not coming to him. I twirled a set of keys on my finger and said, “I’ve noticed that the teaching at UCT is not as good as it used to be. I have friends in Durban,” I lied, “who are raving about the work there. And some of our best teachers have moved to Durban.” This was half-true.
My father looked up: “But UCT’s the best.”
“Sure, but I’d be six hours instead of seventeen away by car. I could come home . . . ”
I was skilled. He didn’t need to hear more than that. A year later I left Cape Town the same way that I had left home: promising myself I wouldn’t look back, that I would reinvent myself, that I had nothing to stay for and that city, like home, had spit me out anyway. I’d had no choice. I missed Rodney, the parties, the freedom and the hiding place that was his home but once again I relished the opportunity to be where no one knew me.
Durban
I ARRIVED IN DURBAN with my parents, who helped me move into a flat—it was mid-semester and too late to find a room in residence. The flat was bright but it felt bleak—at first, empty inside the way I was always feeling those days. I hadn’t counted on the fact that arriving somewhere without a single friend might take some getting used to. I had to work hard not to hate it.
On the plane, as I sat with my mother to my left and my father to my right, the three of us exchanged very few words. Familiar silence. We read the paper and occasionally smiled up at each other. If we pretended we were fine then we were fine. I suspect they were just grateful that I was continuing with medicine. When I told her I was switching universities, my mother had thrown in some gossip about someone’s child who was dropping out or changing courses because he couldn’t cope. At least she didn’t have to say the same about me. “It’s a good change,” she said more to herself than to me. “You’ll be less distracted in Durban. All your rowdy friends are in Cape Town.” It was the story she was telling everyone at the shop and in all of Kasi. I went along.
They took what they could from my reasons and ignored the details. Of course they had noticed my marks plummeting but I made excuses about not being in the right place and they were fine. Durban was still far enough from home for it to look exotic: it was still going away to varsity, by the ocean. It worked with the image of me we were all selling.
“You know you’ll meet a nice girl and get used to the place,” my father mumbled, keys to my flat in one hand, eyes on the door.
“If you can pick just one!” My mother said, giggling. It was the only time they agreed on something. “I’m sure there’ll be a lot to choose from.”
“Mum . . . ” I started, but stopped as I always did when they mentioned me finding a woman.
My mother put her arm around me and squeezed. “Ah. Don’t always be so shy, Kabi. I think everyone knows you’ll bring home the best kind of Makoti. Who knows? Maybe another doctor. You know you can’t marry just anyone. You have to choose right.”
My father chuckled. I eyed the dust on the kitchen counter.
I felt more alone than ever when they left, waving to me through the car windows as they sped off to the airport.
Every day before opening it, I hovered around the door to my flat, afraid of being harassed by the silence of the new place. The walls were bare, the floors were tiled and unlike the hardwood flooring of res., they were sure be cold in the winter. I seriously wondered if I could make it my own and from time to time weighed the benefits of dating a girl for company against the trouble of being gay.
Over time I learned to open the windows and discovered a beautiful view of the beach and lovely aromas coming from somewhere in the neighbourhood: lilacs, lemons, and frangipanis. The houses were so pretty and the lawns so manicured that I couldn’t help but insert the most charmed lives into them. I discovered that I could hear music from my neighbour’s flat through the kitchen walls and I liked it because while it was only a faint sound and it always took me a minute to work out which song was playing. It felt cheerful and like I had a friend next door.
The hospital was much smaller and much busier than the one at UCT, and Durban seemed a lot quieter in the evenings, with the streets empty by nine o’clock at night when the shops closed. In the daytime if you wished to venture out, there was the beach and the lush countryside. The beauty was expansive and breathtaking, although it paled compared to what Cape Town offered. Daytime Durban felt chaotic, parts of it dirtier than I could st
and. As someone who was always easily overwhelmed, I rarely ventured out into the streets during the day, even when I was not working. I didn’t miss Cape Town as much as I missed home, memories of it arriving in vivid dreams or brought back by a song in the middle of the day. Was it because I was now only a few hours away, or was it because I had absolutely no one I had known here since before adulthood?
It would be three more years before things would start looking up, but at first I retreated. School was demanding. This wasn’t just pre-med anymore, we were fully in medical school, seeing patients, and our housemanships would soon start.
Then there were times when it was painful how much I missed Rodney. I missed his laugh, our car rides to his house, the parties, and the way he’d always open his door like he’d been expecting me. I had managed to push away the guilt for a time but now it came gnawing at me. The distractions here in Durban were not enough. I had essentially left a friend to die and I felt sick about it. I don’t know if it was youth or a well-established understanding of the importance of secrecy, but I had listened and carried on like Rodney was just another secret to bury.
Finding people to spend time with was as complicated as it had been at UCT. I met a few guys on campus and went to some parties with them. They were nothing like the ones at Rodney’s house: the houses were dark and seedy, the music was too loud and it was sometimes hard to know if people actually lived there or if someone had simply rented the place for the purpose of the party. I didn’t feel as close to anyone as I had felt to Rodney, maybe because I was so preoccupied and distant that I could barely manage simple conversation. So I continued sleeping with other students or guys who had come from the townships into the parties in town because here they could be gay without judgment. We’d look past each other before, during, and after sex. Acknowledging each other was too frightening and too painful; if we crossed paths outside the party in broad daylight we were complete strangers.
There was a guy, Dumisani, with whom I met from time to time at these parties and had sex. He was a lot of fun, telling jokes to the group when he was high but never really speaking directly to me when we went into a room or a corner alone. He had a long athletic body, always looking like he’d put extra effort into his clothes. I think that had either one of us been less afraid, we might have found out what else we had in common. At the time we just enjoyed sleeping with each other. Apart from his name I didn’t know who he was or what he did. I pictured him as a commerce student or an engineer—he was so very clean-cut that it wasn’t hard to imagine him passing for straight on the street. Once or twice after sex we shared a cigarette but that was the extent of our intimacy.
Otherwise I heeded my father’s advice and kept my nose in my books. In Durban I grew up and grew quieter. More afraid and less joyful. I understood what had happened to Rodney: he had needed to free himself from his own demons. He wanted to stop the parties and the drugs and wanted his mother to lift him up, to promise him her love. He had opened up and invited his parents into the most frightening part of his life and they had refused to look. Sometimes I admired him for it and other times I cursed his stupidity—his sense of entitlement. Rodney’s problem was that he hadn’t had enough sense to know that it shattered people’s sense of safety—muddled with their need for equilibrium—to think that we were not just characters in books they chose not to read; that we in fact lived and grew up right next door or even worse, in their homes.
How terribly, terribly moronic was Rodney not to know that people would go to great lengths to feel safe again, to live with at least the illusion of equilibrium? He’d been foolish, I decided. It helped assuage my own guilt.
I would sit in my flat seething with rage when I thought of him telling his mother that he “liked to sleep with men.” What did he expect? I went with that anger for a long time, until I couldn’t anymore and I missed him reminded that we were all seized with the need to tell someone sometimes. I could see that he had in fact been brave because unlike him I couldn’t think of a single person I could tell.
And my parents? The only feelings my parents let into conversation were pride and excitement. We were not a family that spoke about what was difficult—we cried in private, alone. My only job was to keep making them proud.
I had developed a routine in Durban: within the first year I had taken up jogging in the mornings, running along the sandy beach at low tide. It was one of the things I had written down and promised myself to do as part of an effort to at least like living where I was. I enjoyed jogging on the beach rather than along the pavement, even though my tekkies got wet and sandy; it felt romantic and of course it was an experience I wouldn’t have had if I’d lived in Jo’burg or Pretoria. I ran at sunrise, since my rounds at the hospital started very early. Hardly anyone was on the beach at that hour except for those who lived on the beach or on the streets and after a while I recognized everyone, waved and kept going. It was the only place outside the hospital where I felt someone was expecting me. Something I liked about running—apart from gradually seeing my body get fitter—was watching the sun rise as if coming out from the deepest sea. It was one of my few pleasures, watching the morning come to life. It was also a time to be alone with my thoughts and my longings before throwing myself into the chaos of the hospital.
I was getting used to being in Durban finally, this place in between my divided past. School was fine, the flat was home. Even speaking to my parents was half bearable.
On the phone my mother asked how I was doing, without really wanting to know, and I didn’t expect more.
One morning at the end of November and close to the beginning of my year of community service I went for my jog as usual. At some point I decided to stop and walk along the boardwalk. I had started earlier than usual that day so the sun had only half risen and no one else was around, not even the woman who showered with her male companion at the beach showers. I walked all the way to the end of the boardwalk and stood at the centre of the square lookout area, watching the waves crash against the poles holding up the cement walkway. I was about to enter my fourth year in Durban and was surprised to realize that this was the first time I had come down here. When I was growing up my mother and I would take walks to the end of the boardwalk on family holidays and one of my favourite things to do at those times was to watch the ships in the distance, looking as if suspended in midair. I would look out until my eyes and back hurt, and when I turned to look up at my mother she’d be in the same position, standing upright, forearms on the railing, eyes squinting against the sun. She always looked distant and forlorn on these occasions, but I didn’t mind, feeling that the longing in her face somehow suited the mood of the ocean. I had come to associate ships and the ocean with sadness and I don’t know if it was because of my mother’s mood or mine on our holidays, but it was a comforting sort of sadness. She and my father didn’t spend time together even when we were on a family holiday. They took turns taking me to different places—which meant time alone for me with each of them.
I was lost in thought and longing again for my home, for things I refused to name, when it occurred to me that I was running out of time to reach the hospital for my shift. Turning around, I swiftly gathered my spirits and started jogging back home. The sun was higher up in the horizon and the vendors were up and running now, putting their stock on the ground, standing wooden artifacts—West African masks and wall hangings—on their tables and hanging hand-made leather sandals against the poles. On the way I was distracted by a woman calmly shifting a screaming infant from her back to her front, cradling it against her chest and taking out her breast to soothe him. There was something so beautiful about the ease with which she did this that I was overcome with a devastating sadness. In the meantime I was running across a busy street without looking and the light had begun to change. A small, white VW hooted and came to a screeching halt to my left. Holding both hands up in apology, I sprinted across but when I stepped ont
o the pavement I realized that the car had come around the corner and stopped in front of me. I was late and not in the mood for an altercation. Worrying that the driver might want to have a fight, I walked away, picking up my pace. Then I heard a shout: “Kabza!” The door of the car opened and when I saw the driver I stumbled from the shock.
There in front of me was Sediba giving a big grin, arms stretched out and offering a hug.
“Heita!” he said, shaking his head. “Ao, I see you want to die in Durban.”
I was speechless. He walked over and wrapped his arms around me with the warmth of a good old friend. His touch and smell felt like home. He looked even better than I remembered and had changed his look: his head was shaved and he had a tapered beard that was so finely cut you could tell it was done by a skilled barber. I wondered if he had done it himself.
“You’re sweating,” he said, pulling back and looking me in the eye.
“I . . . I was out jogging. What are you doing here Jo?” I had my hands in the pockets of my shorts, feeling terribly self-conscious.
Sediba shook his head. His eyes locked into mine, his grin widening. “Long time Jo.”
I laughed nervously, looked at the ground because I couldn’t think what else to do. There were cars coming around the corner and hooting at us to get out of the way, so Sediba gestured towards his car. “Are you going somewhere? Do you want a lift?” He was still holding my gaze, eyes dancing like he couldn’t believe the delightful coincidence.
I gathered my thoughts and quickly said: “Yah! Yah. I have a morning shift and I have to shower—”
“I’ll take you home,” he started walking towards his car before I could respond. My eyes darted from the car to his crisp white shirt and blue jeans to the muscle definition on his arms. I swallowed hard and walked around to the passenger seat and, once seated, opened the window for air. A lovely whiff of Lilac and peppermint filled his car, so strong that I had to close my eyes and keep my nose to the breeze. I felt my mind drifting, returning to a time I had long left behind.
Such a Lonely, Lovely Road Page 7