by Jen Thorpe
‘Thanks for everything, Ruby. See you next week.’
He hesitated a moment, feeling like he should hug her goodbye, but she just lifted her hand in a wave. He walked out the gate and up the road towards his car and decided, impulsively, to head towards town for a drink. He got onto the highway at Hospital Bend. The mist now completely obscured the mountain.
He loved the half-dead trees on the curve where the road split between De Waal and Nelson Mandela Boulevard. Some of them were starting to fall down and others had already been cut and were lying on the ground. Sam opened his window to allow the chill to blow through his car. He came over the crest of the hill and looked down over the harbour and out towards Robben Island. The cranes in the ocean resembled metal giraffes, their long necks reaching to the skyline.
He’d read in the paper the day before that a man was planning to transport himself to Robben Island from Blouberg using only helium balloons. It seemed very far to fly – an unrealistic effort.
The tall buildings of town stood out, silly as Lego towers might seem against this backdrop. They were dwarfed by the scale of natural beauty. Here, in Cape Town, everyone was working for the weekends.
The road bent again, down into town past the Good Hope Centre – surely the ugliest building ever built. It resembled jelly forced out of a cement mould. The road sloped up on Strand Street, and Sam dodged taxis, pedestrians and other cars as he made a quick left into Long Street. The old buildings didn’t have the height of the new ones. Packed together and bearing their age, they straddled the wide street once travelled by horses and carriages. Sam spotted a parking space, a rare treasure on the busy road, and pulled in.
In a French accent, Ludovic the car guard said he’d keep his eye on Sam’s car, and Sam walked up the narrow stairs to Neighbourhood, thinking about how different the trip would have been if he was scared to drive.
12
Ruby
Mastigophobia: Fear of punishment
The next day there was a follow-up meeting for the previous month’s sex-addiction study in the boardroom, so Ruby was stuck in her office, not wanting to leave for fear of interrupting them. She scanned through the list of participants for the phobia study and her notes from the first session, ready to be typed up into the preliminary framework of the report to the Ministry. They required a session-by-session report each week, and then a final assessment no later than one month after each study. Being studious, she always managed to get things in on time, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed it. In fact, it was the worst part of her job.
This was particularly true when people pulled out so early on and she would have to explain why. Shortly after the first meeting Nomboniso phoned to say she would rather deal with washing her yoga mat many times each day because she felt too much negative energy in the room to continue with the study.
The man who was afraid of spiders decided to go to psychiatric sessions on the advice of his doctor. That meant Simon the xenophobe would need to be paired with Johnson, who was from Zimbabwe. Ruby negotiated several calls from Simon about this, trying to tell him how developmental it would be and checking whether she’d be able to accommodate him with one of the other participants, but nobody wanted to swap, and so in the end he had to choose Johnson or leave. It would do Simon good, she thought, and perhaps Johnson would be strong enough to deal with his nonsense. She had called Johnson to explain the situation and he was happy to give it a try. It had taken a while to get him off the phone, however, because he kept asking her question after question that had nothing to do with Simon. When she hung up eventually, she felt as though he still wanted to say something else. She couldn’t wait all day, though – she had things to do.
Really she was thinking about Sam. Sam Edwards, a volunteer wildfire fighter and a man who was so worried about his mom’s safety that he’d developed a vicarious phobia. While a bit extreme, she didn’t think you could get any sweeter than that. She worried, though, that this type of attraction meant she’d spent too much time around the unwell. Sam was good-looking, intelligent, and paired up with Nazma. They’d seemed to have a connection in the group session. Ruby imagined them together and felt irritated and jealous, but silly at the same time. Plenty of fish in the sea – she just needed to get wet more often. She blushed at her own crudeness.
She turned on her computer to start writing the Ministry’s report. The template’s empty blocks flashed at her, inviting input. Looking at the pile of forms and imagining completing it, she groaned and leant back, looking out of the window at the mountain for a while. She had been working solidly for two hours without as much as a tea or wee break. The group in the meeting room looked animated and she knew that to walk in now would ruin the mood. She contemplated the template once more, then felt the tingle of a naughty idea at the corners of her mind.
Maybe she could find out more about some of the members of the phobia group the easy way. It wouldn’t be wrong. It wasn’t like she was going to get in touch with them or anything. She would just be looking at all their photos and friends and family members. At their ‘likes’ and groups. She opened Facebook, signed in, and began to stalk – unprofessional, but highly satisfying.
She finally found Sam on the fourth try. The other three Sam Edwards weren’t so easy on the eye. He was alone in the photo, standing on top of Lion’s Head. Obviously someone else was there to take the picture, but his relationship status said single. Ruby scratched her head again, hoping the status was correct.
Behind him, in the photo, the water curved away from the coast and you could see Robben Island in the background. She remembered her own visit – how she’d thought the ferry ride was the most honest thing about that tourist destination, and how all that blue paint in the cells reminded her of school galas when she was small. The penguins, innocent in their natural habitat, had provided a strange contrast to the grumpy guide, who’d delivered his narrative without frills and rushed them past Mandela’s cell.
She browsed through Sam’s other pictures. They were mostly of him doing athletic things like hiking and running. There were a few old ones of him and a girl, from at least two years before, but hardly any of him and his family – strange for someone who was so concerned about his mother.
His job said ‘SEO specialist at Arachnid’. She opened another tab and googled SEO. Search Engine Optimisation. Apparently you needed to include keywords on your website to make it appear higher up on the search results, and this made your advertising space more valuable. Ruby noted this on her stack of Post-its. It might be a way to reconnect with Sam after the study. CIL could do with some advertising, especially in the current funding climate.
She looked down his list of relatives and saw a link to his mom. She seemed very serene in all her photographs, all flowing pants and linen blouses. Ruby saw a link to a website. Sam’s mom sold paintings, and was also a reiki practitioner.
She clicked the link from Sam’s mom to his dad. According to his dad’s profile, he was much older than Sam’s mom; it didn’t say anything about his job. His photograph was still the stock-standard white outline on a blue background, and he didn’t have much content there. It hadn’t been updated in years. Ruby wished her parents didn’t know how to use Facebook. What a blessing that would be. Instead it was now the place where her mother complained to other mothers about Ruby’s failure to settle down, tagging Ruby in the posts.
Ruby went back to Sam’s page and opened his photos one last time. Finally, she found the gem – his matric dance picture. He had longish hair and was wearing a suit that looked too big for him. He was skinnier then, and had a few pimples. His date wore shiny eye make-up, and an even shinier dress. Ruby remembered she had worn the same style dress to her dance, and cringed. Then the phone rang and she closed the page immediately, as though the mouthpiece of the phone was a periscope from downstairs and they could see her stalking. It was only Mel, checking if she needed any new stationery. She declined and went back to the report.
Th
e first session of the study in fear and phobia was an introductory session. The aim was to ensure that participants could get to know one another. Two participants exited the study after the first session, citing personal commitments and medical advice as their reasons. Their records have been stored for future contact.
The group dynamic was interesting given the diversity. One member has been identified as disruptive, and Fairouz and I will work to ensure that he won’t be able to lead the group away from its palliative potential.
Writing these reports always made her feel detached from the feelings that actually occurred in the sessions. Sometimes you couldn’t fit what worked and didn’t work into neat blocks next to a budget, but when the bucks were few, you had to do what you had to do.
The need to wee was becoming distracting. She crossed her legs and knyped. With the first bit of the first report to the Ministry done, she logged back onto Facebook. Turning her screen a little further away from the group in the room, just in case, she typed in ‘Nazma Matthews’.
Nazma came up, smiling with another girl in the photo. Ruby put her mouse over her face to see that her name was Nafeesa. A sister? They looked very similar except Nafeesa looked a little chubbier, and a bit older. She had the same large, beautiful eyes as Nazma, and they were laughing in the photograph. The photo was dated and Nazma looked much younger than she was now.
Her last update was that she’d been on another driving lesson and it had lasted about twenty minutes. Her parents couldn’t be found on Facebook, and there were no photos of them on Nazma’s page either. They were online-identity free.
Nazma had listed her interests as cooking, baking, cooking schools, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson and the Croissant Appreciation Society. Ruby clicked through to the last page and saw it had a rather large following. There was really something for everyone on Facebook. There were a few more pictures of Nazma with a chef’s hat on, but the most recent one was from a year before. Her profile was only about four years old, and the photos didn’t go back further than that.
Ruby looked at Nazma’s photo for a while, and then clicked over to her own Facebook page. There was a message from her mother asking her to call her, and her brother had poked her repeatedly. She sighed and looked out the window at the mountain again, then picked up the phone. She dialled the familiar number, hoping there was signal roaming wherever he was.
‘Hey, Jeff.’
‘Rubybooby, long time no hear. How are things going?’
The line was crackly and Jeff sounded far away. She felt sad that they hadn’t seen each other in so long, her chest heavy with the weight of their childhood and the absence of a more present relationship.
‘Ag, same same. Busy at the Centre. Still swimming. No news that will change the world. And you?’
‘We’re over here in Libya at the moment. It’s pretty rough. I haven’t had a shower or a decent shit in weeks. But it seems like we’re really making progress. The issues are really changing here …’
Jeff drifted off to diplomat talk and Ruby began to rearrange her desk. She wanted so badly to relate to him, and in a way she did. She also cared about making things better, but she just wanted to do it person by person rather than country by country. Somehow everyone, her mother in particular, seemed to think that Jeff’s way was more important.
Jeff’s voice was a pleasant murmur in her ear. She couldn’t hold their mother’s bias against him. He was pretty fucking fabulous.
‘ … So yes, I should be home in a few weeks …’
‘Really? So soon? Maybe we could do a dinner?’
‘Sounds great, kiddo. When last did you see Mom and Dad?’
‘Um, it feels like not long enough ago …’
‘Rubybooby, come on now.’
‘Jeffyweffy, piss off.’
She looked to the right and saw that people were starting to filter out of the main room. She uncrossed her legs and felt about to burst.
‘Listen, I have to go. I miss you, big brother. Come swing by my place for a glass of wine sometime when you’re back hey? Forget the parentals for a second. We can visit them some other time. It’s far anyway.’
‘I’ve got to go too. I’m expecting a call from Nkosazana soon.’
‘Ha ha. Sure thing. Big man as always. Love you.’
‘Love you too.’
She hung up and jumped from her chair, finally able to rush to the loo. Done in the bathroom, she went back to her office to get her diary, paging through it as she strolled downstairs to find Fairouz to plan the next phobia meeting. As she got to the bottom of the stairs, there was an awkward silence.
‘What’s up, guys?’
‘Ruby …’ said Mel.
‘Yup?’ She reached for a hair on her shoulder, and brushed it to the ground. She was always fearful that some day she’d look down and there would be dandruff like in the adverts. It was one of the reasons she’d started scratching her head – so nothing could form there. When she was younger, she’d scratched to the point of little scabs everywhere on her head. The beta blockers usually helped, but she hadn’t had any for a while.
‘Didn’t you see the news?’
‘What is it, Mel? You all look like you’ve seen a scary clown for god’s sake.’
‘They’ve done a cabinet reshuffle and moved our minister to the Environment Committee.’
‘Shit! And who’s the new Minister for Wellbeing?’
‘They’ve brought back Cambada.’
Mel handed her the newspaper with a photograph of Cambada in a press release. Ruby’s legs turned to jelly. She examined the Minister’s face for signs that she might be a changed person. It was still fat yet sharp-featured, perhaps because of the defiant expression she constantly wore. It was her stock-standard ‘you can’t catch me’ face, and Ruby imagined she’d needed it often in the past decade, moving from one department to the next, making a mess of things. In the photo she was adorned with several large pieces of jewellery, and Ruby could see three dark moles beneath a load of gaudy necklaces. Her eyebrows had been shaved off and drawn on.
Cambada had been Minister for Wellbeing five years before and had depleted the resources of the Ministry on spending sprees during trips to New York that were supposed to be for United Nations’ conventions on mental health. CIL had released a strong statement condemning her misuse of money at the expense of those who needed it most. It didn’t have any effect, of course: none of the big guns were brave enough to challenge someone who was obviously so close to Number One that she could avoid prosecution for gross misconduct. But after an affair with her deputy minister went sour, Cambada had been moved to another department. This shift back to Wellbeing meant bad news for the Ministry. Definitely mismanagement, probably fund withdrawal.
Ruby herself had written the opinion piece that demanded Cambada’s resignation. She knew Cambada would know that. She felt nauseous, imagining what the fallout from this would be.
‘Do you think she’ll remember us, Ruby?’
She knew that by ‘us’ Mel meant Ruby. She put on what she hoped was a calm and not psychotic expression.
‘Surely not, don’t panic. Do you want to meet in the boardroom in ten minutes to talk about our strategy and statement on the issue? It will all be fine, everyone. Don’t panic.’
‘You said that already,’ said Welly, his normally jovial face marked with concern.
Ruby’s voice did sound strained, even to her own ears. They all went back to their offices and Ruby moved to the kitchen. She felt simultaneously light-headed and heavy-footed. You couldn’t criticise the Ministry and get away with it. People lost funding for even well-deserved criticism, the same way you were sure to get funding when you spent your time schmoozing all the right people. She had been off the schmooze circuit for a while, confident that all was on track, but that had just changed. Everything was up in the air. ‘Whoosh,’ she said, making herself a cup of milky sweet coffee, her fingers creeping to her scalp, beginning to scratch.
13
Nazma
Amaxophobia: Fear of riding in a car
Nazma, nervous and feeling overdressed, was waiting for Sam to come and get her for their first activity. The Rondebosch library parking lot was almost empty, with twice the number of car guards as there were cars, and it was early enough that the dew still glistened on the leaves of the trees nearby. The old white library stood out among the new buildings surrounding the lot, seeming much sturdier than they did. Students had to live somewhere, and the more of them you stacked up on top of one another, the more money you could make out of your tiny plot of land.
Sam arrived, and waved to her from across the parking lot. He looked so relaxed driving, and she felt a twinge of jealousy. He was wearing a dark green fleece jacket, his hair tousled like he hadn’t slept well, but he was grinning nonetheless. Initially, she’d been nervous to go with him. They were practically strangers, but somehow she didn’t feel afraid enough not to go. She actually felt fine, and this made her a bit nervous again.
They were supposed to choose a place for their first exercise that was special to one of them. She’d said that Sam should go first, and she’d choose the next one, mostly because she wasn’t sure where she’d go. She had a few spots in mind, but the spaces she enjoyed didn’t seem cool enough. If she saw Sam’s she would at least know what the standards were. The bar would be set.
He drove a Fiesta with Taz the Tasmanian Devil on a sticker on the back. Inside, his car was infinitely more comfortable than the many driving-school cars she’d been in before, and it smelled like cigarettes. She climbed in and they moved to hug each other hello, but his seat belt pulled him back into his seat. Embarrassed, she held up her hand for a high five instead as he reached to shake her hand, clasping it tightly. He released it and she shifted awkwardly in her seat, not sure whether to laugh or not.