“Come in and sit,” Sediba said.
His house looked very much the same except it seemed freshly painted. I pulled up the first chair at the table and sat, leaning against the wall. He stood with his back against the fridge and looked out through the window across the room.
“Do you have a lot of bad dreams?” he said without looking at me.
“Since my mother died and . . . Yah, I do.”
“You dream of your mother?”
I nodded. “And my patients. And you.”
He walked over to the cabinet and took out a glass, filled it with water and came to hand it to me. I took a sip before putting it down, fearing that something was wrong, sensing that he was more distant than he had been the morning of my father’s funeral.
He said, “You saw Thuli today.”
It was odd, the way he said it, like it was so important when I myself had thought nothing of it, and it sent me into a dizzying panic and I closed my eyes.
“She’s really nice,” I said but Sediba didn’t say anything back.
I sat up and asked, “Why do you ask?”
The room was darker now and he walked over to the wall near the fridge to switch the light on. He said, his voice heavy and dragging, like he was being forced to perform an act that went against his nature, “I’m marrying her.”
My stomach turned and I was about to vomit all the beer I had had the night before. I leaned forward, started to stand up but decided against it.
“What do you mean?”
I was aware of my voice rising, my body feeling cold. My legs were trembling and I pressed down on my knees with the heels of my palms.
Sediba remained calm. He looked at me with maddening patience, as if I were just learning a language he had long ago mastered, but he was willing to help me along.
“I can’t let her down now. I’ve already agreed to it.”
“You’ve been sleeping with . . . a woman? Jeez, Sediba, I know it was a terrible break up, but what the hell? You’ve been sleeping with Thuli?”
“No! Of course not. It’s just, Tshepo died and she’s been miserable, not wanting to face raising the baby alone. I said I would help.”
“No one thinks it’s your baby though, do they?”
I noted that I had not heard anyone mention it.
He folded his arms, his chest rising.
“No one expects you to marry her!” I said and went to stand in front of him.
He blinked when he saw me come. I could see him getting ready for a defense but his heart was not in it, his voice was tired. He said, “Look, you know I’ve always wanted a marriage and a family—”
“Like this? This is like Lelo.”
“Don’t say that Kabz. Don’t say that. It’s not like Lelo. It’s more—”
“More what? It’s not more fucking honest, that’s for sure.”
“I wanted you. I wanted to marry you and you didn’t want me. You have no leg to stand on, telling me what’s honest.”
I put both my hands on his arms and took a deep breath.
“I did—I do want you. I always have.”
He turned his head to the side and moved out of my embrace and out of my reach. I followed him to the fridge, where he resumed his previous, distant pose.
“Look,” he said, his voice calmer now. “It’s an arrangement. It’s not some love story. The man she loves is dead.”
“And the man you love is not,” I said. I felt bolder now. I had swum deep in the depths of loneliness and fear all my life and I had come up having learnt a new language.
He looked me up and down, shaking his head like he was seeing me for the first time since I had walked into his house. I saw his shoulders slump, his body being held up by the fridge he was leaning against.
“Diba,” I whispered to him, reaching for his hand.
He kept shaking his head. “We couldn’t anyway. You were right. We couldn’t be together here, with everyone.” His arm swept the air. His voice cracked.
I stepped closer to him. “I think we can,” I told him and surprised us both. “I think you’re the one who was right.”
“We can’t . . . not here. What do you think those guys will say? Trunka? Lelo? Can you see them looking at us as a couple? Taking us seriously? Come on, Jo. The things you said to me in Cape Town about living in a different world from Scott . . . it’s true.”
“This is what I was saying in Durban when you told me to fuck off and stormed off!” I reminded him bitterly, but he only shook his head. “That was something else. You can’t bring that life here,” he said stabbing the air with his finger. “You can’t. Not here. Believe me, I’ve lived here longer, I hear what the guys say. You wouldn’t want to hear it.”
“You know what’s fucked up? I was always the one who was more afraid. I was always saying: Not here. Don’t hold my hand here, people will know. Let’s not do this, we’ll be found out. Then just before you left you said something about it not being a game, and that really stayed with me.” I paused to collect myself. “The thing is, I really did make a mess of things. I know I did. But I always assumed you were the brave one. I mean, I have never ever been brave. When we were growing up I was the one surrounded by girls, while you, you were not trying so hard. I was a mess in Cape Town, always hiding . . . doing things in the dark, running from my friends. I was miserable.”
He looked at me and I could see that he was remembering Scott’s wedding, my meeting Rod again.
“Then Durban was a different kind of misery, but you came and it was . . . it was the most . . . peaceful time of my life.”
Sediba closed his eyes.
“Then you left . . . and I was alone again and I was so sorry—so sorry that I had thrown you out just so that my life could remain a secret because I didn’t want anyone else looking at me the way my mother did, saying, ‘Sies’ when they found out I was gay. Then I met this boy. This sixteen-year-old boy who told me about how he had loved someone and loved her until the end. I don’t want to be that guy who comes home to no one and then goes out to clubs and parties looking to find something.”
We stared at each other, nothing moving. I pressed my hands against the countertop and refocused. “But here I am now and I’m saying fuck it Jo, let’s do this. Let’s be together. Now you are the one who is afraid. Because your old comrades are here and you don’t want them losing respect for you.”
I knew that that part about “your comrades” would hurt and I was not sure how sorry I was to have said it.
He went to sit down.
“Say something,” I begged. His drew in his shoulders as though he was cold and stared at the floor. There was no noise except the occasional car and a barking dog.
Finally he said, “I promised.”
“She can’t expect you to marry her, she knows about me. That’s what was a little odd about seeing her. I thought she knew something. She knows about me.”
He stood up and came to me, his eyes uncharacteristically shifty. He said, “Of course she knows. But—”
“Then she won’t marry you, now that I’m back. She won’t, will she?”
“I promised her. She’s like a sister to me.”
“Listen to yourself, Diba. Listen to yourself.”
He looked down at his palms and then brought them up to cover his face. I waited for him to speak, to give me something to hold on to. He stared down at his feet before his eyes came back up to me:
“You come and go. You want me and then you don’t. You want to come to the township but then you don’t plan for it. I waited and waited and then one day you were saying we couldn’t. Now—”
“Now I’m here.”
He turned sharply on his heel and went to open the door. “I need to think,” he told me.
“
About what?”
“I don’t just go back on my word and break promises. I said I’d marry her and now I need . . . I need to think.”
“I’m leaving!” I said, sounding overly dramatic. I picked up my back, slung it over my shoulder and stormed out.
Behind me I heard him say: “Wait . . . ”
I paused, then marched back in. He was sitting at his table, wiping his eyes.
“Do what you want,” I said. “It’s up to you. But I won’t be here to watch.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I will leave. Sell the surgery and go somewhere else. I won’t stay here and watch you live that life.”
I wanted to go to him and hold him, but I turned my back and marched off.
I passed the next few days on the fuel of my rage. You can get a lot accomplished while running on anger. It is easier and not as debilitating as sadness. I hated my mother for her suicide. I hated my father for betraying my mother and I really hated Sediba for leaving me now, when I thought we finally could be together. So I refused to speak to him. He phoned and left me messages.
And yet every night when I returned home I needed to speak to him. There was not a part of me that didn’t ache for his warmth, his comfort. The house felt empty and Aus’ Tselane still had not come back.
If it had been at all possible—if I had had no memories of growing up in the place and didn’t see the clean white walls behind the softer, cream ones, or if I didn’t still expect to see neat rows of white roses every time I stepped out of the house instead of the tall overgrown flowers I couldn’t name—I might have seriously considered staying in my childhood home. It was large and beautiful and only a short walk to and from work.
It would have made sense for another man to stay, not me. Neither the township nor the house was for me. The place was spitting me out every day, in spite of my desire to stay and serve the people and make it work. It seemed I had to pack up and find a new home.
At the surgery I found that my patients’ illnesses were getting less and less varied. After the first wave of the older people coming to pay their respects, there was an influx of younger patients. I think that the older people had liked coming to have a chat with my father and their visits were really only visits in the traditional sense. Every now and then a grandmother or grandfather would come in and say, “Kabelo, give me something for my knees, tu!” “Your father used to give me this pill that was red and round. Give me that one.” And I would have to look through their file to see what medicine they were on. They would stay and chat about the weather, about how schools were getting smaller because children were sick and not attending. They would point in the direction of a house I was meant to remember from childhood, that used to be the home of someone I was supposed to have played with, and they would say: “Remember Tshepo (or Thuso or Phenyo)? Mmm. Him too.”
But mainly I was seeing younger patients. Neo, my father’s secretary and now mine, told me that the surgery had hardly ever been that full in my father’s last few years, confirming what I had begun to suspect: I was running a very different practice from the one my father had run. I was grateful to be busy, on the one hand, on the other hand it was desperately sad to watch my old township slowly become something like a ghost town. I realized that in a few years most of the people I had grown up with would not be around anymore.
The illness was coming quickly and it was coming for my friends.
When Base came in I admit that I was unprepared. We didn’t make appointments for people, which had also been my father’s policy. When cell phones became popular, I remember my mother saying that he should now tell people to make appointments so that he ran what she called “a proper business,” but he refused. He said it would always be his policy that whoever got up in the morning needing to see a doctor should see the doctor before the sun went down. It was challenging, but there were trees all around the yard and I had gone out and bought extra chairs so that people could sit in the shade while they waited. I asked Neo to have a jug of water ready every day. I paid a local boy who sold water in the squatter camps to sell me several litres a day, and paid two teenagers to come and pour water for waiting patients. I couldn’t help how long the lines were. A few times I even worked on Sundays.
There was a long-standing camaraderie and strong cooperation between the township doctors that I quite appreciated. Although there were not many who were young—most people my age had opted for hospital or city jobs. But still, I could send my patients to other people and they did the same.
When Base decided to seek help from me, I had not seen my friends much because of the work. He came in looking frail, using a walking stick. His eyes were yellow, his skin ashen. Neo had asked him to come straight in while I was away on call, and on returning I picked up his near-empty file. My heart raced when I saw it, but I composed myself before walking in, all cheerful, like I had no idea what might be wrong with him. But Base was not fooled.: “You know, Jo, I saw you look at me that day when you came back. I know you know.”
He was sitting in the leather armchair in the corner instead of the exam table. I suspected that was because he couldn’t climb onto it.
I sat down and clasped my hands. I could see he was looking for a friend and not a doctor and this was very new for me. It was clearer now, at this moment, that Durban would have been much easier. I didn’t have dying childhood friends there.
“Eish, Jo . . . ” I started and stumbled.
Base held up his hand. “O sa wara, Jo. That’s life.”
“Did you see my father?”
He coughed. “Yoh! No man. The old man would have been good to me, but you know how it is. He was like a father to us. We get this thing from being bad. You can’t go and tell your father you got stung being bad.”
At least he was acknowledging that he knew what he had. HIV/AIDS was never spoken of outright around here. Pronouncing the words was like speaking ill of the dead: it was not done. People came up with imagined causes of death: cancer, high blood, stroke. Never the right thing. It carried too much shame.
I nodded and sat up straight, looking out the window, fully aware that it was unprofessional to want to cry about a patient’s illness, but this was not just a patient. This was a boy I had played marbles and top with. This was a guy who had swum in his underwear in my swimming pool and pulled a thorn out of my heel when I had stepped barefoot in a side bush.
“We all have it,” he said, sweeping the air with his arm. “You’ll see.”
I wept when he left. I sat at my chair while patients waited outside for their doctor and wept into my sleeve before rolling it back up and going out to see more of them.
That afternoon I decided that I wanted to go to Morula City—which people called Central because of its proximity to the central point for taxis coming and going from different townships. Neo said we needed some things—toilet paper and hand soap—and I told her that I would go instead because there were fewer patients and I could see them before going out for lunch. She was confused and surprised because I never did go out for lunch. But that day I decided that I would do so because I needed desperately to get a glimpse of Sediba.
Central is on a road that connects two townships and across the street from the African Sun Hotel, a hotel and casino that attracts a large number of tourists to the location. People joke that the hotel is the only place to see white people in the township. There is another road, one that runs perpendicular to the township connector road. It had been built very much in the same way that roads were built under apartheid: skillfully, with brilliant engineering and, most importantly, to separate one place from another, one kind of people from another. If you were driving from town and you were looking for the African Sun Hotel, you would not have to see the realities of the location. You could drive straight down, passing undeveloped land that is green and lush in the summer so
that it feels like you are passing the beautiful countryside, and then go right into the luxury of the hotel and resort with its sprawling golf course and casino that sits near a man-made lake.
I drove from the surgery to Central and parked my car in the large and clean parking lot, where women and men in overalls swept away empty cigarette packets and picked up soft-drink cans and offered to watch or wash your car for a few rand. I checked myself in the mirror before walking through to Chilly’s, the café and food shop that stood across the courtyard from Sediba’s salon.
Chilly is a man about ten years older than I am. His place used to be one of the location’s most beloved tuck shops, a small spaza that he ran out of his house. He sold the best atchaar and Morning Meal, a special township dish with atchaar, boere worst and beans. It moved to a tin house, which he built behind his main house until he was making enough money to build a brick garage and put up a big sign with a red chilly as the apostrophe in Chilly’s. It was sometime during my second year a UCT, I think, that my mother told me that he had moved on to the mall and was now a medium-sized restaurant with tables and chairs for patrons. He was a large man with no hair on his head and a finely tapered beard, which he got shaped every week at Sediba’s salon. I had a great fondness for Bra Chilly, the man with a warm grin that missed a right canine, and a belly that jiggled up and down when he laughed.
Making my way through the sea of shoppers, I ducked into the food courtyard where there was less commotion. My heart raced at the sight of the large red and white sign that read SEDIBA’S SALON AND BARBER. Sediba’s mother had named her hairdressing business after her only child and now he was her partner. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get a glimpse of him, but didn’t want to be seen peeking, so I darted across to Chilly’s and stood in line to order my food. Still, I knew how things went: someone would spot me and news would spread around the mall: “There’s Kabelo Mosala.”
“Dr Mosala?”
“Yah. Still unmarried?”
Such a Lonely, Lovely Road Page 21