Cruel Crazy Beautiful World

by Troy Blacklaws

  The bag of oranges falls. The bag splits and oranges scatter. There’s an eerie hiatus before her voice skirls over the market.

  The dreadlock dude’s devil sticks fall.

  The fruit seller abandons his chant between syllables. Liii ...

  I feel as if I am running underwater, through kelp. I can hardly swing my feet.

  The hobo professor catches her as she falls. He lays her head down in the green-tinted shade of his fig tree. Her hair spills like that of Venus coming out of the sea. Moonfleet sniffs at her.

  I tug off my T-shirt and slide it under her head.

  A man comes out of the Fisherman’s Cottage with a glass in hand.

  I beg him for the glass. I tip out the liquid and lemon rind and catch a cube of ice in my hand. I slide ice over her forehead and along her arms. By now we are surrounded by a throng of gazers who frown at my zany method. Once the ice melts, my fingers ghost over her skin.

  In my mind her skin’s a flawless canvas. I paint in pale-pink nipples and her navel, a comma halving the flat plane between the parentheses of her hips.

  The bleeding man writhes wordlessly. His head is pooled in blood.

  How can I conjure fantasies of a girl while a man’s life bleeds away? How come folk all tune in to her fate rather than his?

  Only now the man from the Fisherman’s Cottage goes to call an ambulance.

  And the dreadlock dude tugs the knife out. Then he stabs it into the fig tree and wipes his hands on his jeans.

  And the hobo has a shot at plugging the wound with his hands.

  I feel a ripple under the seagull girl’s skin. Her eyelids flicker and lift subtly and her eyes glint through narrow slits before her lids fall again. Then, suddenly, her eyelids peel apart to reveal her lagoon-green eyes. I smile at her but she stares through me. I want to kiss the hint of squint lines fanning out from the corner of her eyes, or the cinnamon stipples along her cheekbones.

  Now other folk cart her away to the Burgundy Hotel. I feel as if they want to pluck her white skin away from my coloured hands.

  Now the man’s dead and the stabbed fig tree weeps white sap and the hobo’s hands are stained red.

  I pick up my T-shirt. I find a thread of her hair, virile as horsehair. I fiddle it round a finger and hold it up to the sun. Then I cover the head of the dead man with my T-shirt.

  Around me folk voice their verdict on the murder. How this is proof of a country going to the dogs. How he must have done something dodgy.

  The professor rifles through the man’s pockets and finds a tatty, warped passport.

  – He’s from Zim.

  – Just another refugee, says the fruit seller.

  Moonfleet laps at the pool of clotting blood.

  – We are all refugees in this land, tunes the professor to his dog.

  Then he clicks bloody fingers and they go: the professor’s earflaps flapping, a tatty string dangling from his pocket, Moonfleet’s tail tillering through the wind.

  A siren yowls at an impervious sun.

  At my stall again, I hide the seagull girl’s hair in a book: Of Love and Other Demons.

  I put on my rugby jersey (always on hand for when the wind picks up).

  – This town’s not just whales and hibiscus, Hunter remarks. Things can get hazardous.

  I forget my luck in finding a memento of her and slide into sorrow for this land where a man is killed for the sin of being foreign.

  12

  A FARM SOMEWHERE SOUTH of the Limpopo. Dusk.

  A hare hops across the veld and the gunmen drop their guns to trap it.

  Ghost Cowboy slides from his saddle to join in the sport.

  Each time the hare darts for a gap they flap scarecrow hands.

  Ghost Cowboy flings a stone. The hare flinches as the stone thups into fur-hidden bone.

  The men laugh.

  Out of the corner of his eye Jabulani sees a Poleman run. His eyes pan to follow him. Behind him he hears the haw-hawing of the men and the dull tattoo of stones finding their mark.

  He turns to see blood seeping through quivering fur.

  Ghost Cowboy catches sight of the fleeing man and vaults onto his horse.

  Ghost Cowboy fells him with one shot from his long gun.

  The Zimbabwean cartwheels in the dust.

  The horse’s front hooves dance around the baying head of the fallen man. The horseman coolly fires another shot from the saddle. The man’s head jerks before the bullet whiplashes in Jabulani’s ears.

  The horseman nooses the man’s foot and tows him through the dust.

  The gunmen order the Polemen to fling him onto the back of the Land Rover. For the crocodiles.

  Then the Polemen sing again to the rhythm of the falling picks. They are not yet dead, so they sing. They sing of the sight of their village when they journey home by train after a long exile. They sing of the healing, humid balm of a woman’s hips. They sing of the magic in the dancing feet of a young girl.

  Far to the north, across the Limpopo, a woman senses her man died a dry, bitter death and a wail pipes from her lips to the sun.

  13

  HERMANUS. ANOTHER SUNUP.

  Seagulls mewl and loop in a mother-of-pearl sky. Sparrows chirrup cheerily in the frangipani. Dassies drift out of hiding.

  The seagull girl comes out of the white house, bread in hand.

  Sparrows take flight as she floats towards the frangipani.

  She comes to a standstill, bamboozled by this wonder. The frangipani’s fingers bear a myriad of vivid oranges.

  I stay hiding in the fynbos. I laugh in my soul at the sight of her rubbing her eyes.

  She picks one of the oranges and handles it as if to prove it is not dreamt. She tosses the orange up and catches it, tosses it up and catches it.

  I hear the sweet smack of the rind in her palm. She looks at me without seeing me.

  As she comes out of the gate, she drops the orange into a pocket of her dress.

  She flings bread to the gulls and dassies, then holds out a hand for the sparrows to peck from. All the while she casts her eyes about in the hope of unravelling the enigma of the frangipani.

  When the bread is all gone she walks down the stone steps to the tidal pool.

  At the edge of the pool she peels down to a jade bikini. Tattooed angel wings arc from her shoulder blades to flirt with the hem of her low-slung bikini. The tenuous string of her bikini top stops her wings from unfurling to fly her, a girl Icarus, away over the blind blue deep of Walker Bay.

  I flinch at the thought of the tattoo needle sliding its black blood under her skin.

  She dives headlong into the pool. The water warps her outline, forming sine-wave contours as she glides under the surface. She comes up gasping from the cold. Then she swims butterfly out to the far wall. With each forward swing of her arms, her wings slope up out of the water. I suck in a gasp of sea air at each sighting of her wings.

  A high rogue wave sends fizzing foam over the wall, now to hide her from my eyes, now to reveal again her sinuous curves as the fizz fades. At the wall she does an oh-so-tidy flip turn, heels tucked to her sweet jade ass.

  I feel faint.

  Now she floats on the surface, fanning her toes to the sky the way hollow-boned old men do on the Dead Sea. She yields to the whim of ebb and fetch, and each time I fear she’ll be sucked out to sea by an ebbing wave, another wave sweeps over the wall.

  On this edge of the tidal pool it is merely the slight heft of an orange that keeps the wind from filching her flimsy dress.

  I run on past the tidal pool, out to the flat, hard sand by the lagoon. I duck when a screaming gull dives down at me from the sky. It circles, then swoops again. This time its webbed claws graze my hands as I hood my scalp. I dart away from the dunes where the gull’s eggs huddle in some hidden hollow.

  14

  A FARM SOMEWHERE SOUTH of the Limpopo. Dusk.

  They play football on hard, foot-mortared sand behind the farmhouse. The ball is s
hot far beyond the rickety posts.

  Jabulani follows the ball into the bundu and a shot sings past his ear. He flings himself down in the dust.

  The other Zimbabweans laugh. They have all had their turn to piss their pants for fetching a stray ball without a nod from the gunmen.

  The gunmen put two crates of cold beer down. Before long the upbeat banter of the Zimbabweans is about football and girls. None allude to their shot countryman. None glance at the crocodile pond for fear of sighting a bone or foot.

  The cold glass is soothing in Jabulani’s skinned palms.

  Beyond him he hears the yelps of the children of the gunmen cavorting in the swimming pool. He craves the thought of gliding underwater as he used to in the school pool on weekends. He hears the rhythmic dup dup of a tennis ball on a tennis court. The sound recalls the thupping of stone into hare hide.

  A peacock cries caaaoooow.

  Jonas swings a panga blade down. A watermelon falls into gaping red hemispheres. He deftly slices it up.

  The men flaunt absurd green Picasso grins as they gnaw at the watermelon rind.

  A black girl carries a crate of beer to the gunmen. She wears no shirt. She is young.

  The gunmen smirk at her bobbling breasts as she twists the lids off the beer bottles. Scarface pinches her ass.

  Ghost Cowboy signals to Jabulani to come over.

  He jogs up to the gunmen and the girl.

  – Yes?

  – Yes, master, Ghost Cowboy snarls.

  – Yes, master.

  – Do you find this girl pretty?

  – She is pretty.

  – Master.

  – Master.

  – Would you fuck her? baits Scarface.

  – She’s just a girl.

  Ghost Cowboy squeezes a breast in his hand till she flinches from pain.

  – She’s ripe as a mango, tunes Ghost Cowboy.

  – You are not a good man, master.

  All the other white men guffaw.

  – Woooah. You gonna go to hell, hey? Hey, hey? taunts Scarface.

  – Will I go to hell, boy? Ghost Cowboy asks.

  – That is for God to judge, Jabulani murmurs.

  – God? If I make this girl go down on me now, will God be a hero? Will he shoot me down with a bolt? Or maybe send an angel to kill me dead? Remember how the Nazis turned Jew-skin into lampshades and God did fuckall. If not for the Americans they’d have wiped the Jews off the planet. Now Mugabe fucks you folk over and over again and the Americans look away this time. Then, wahaaaaaa, like some crazy jack-in-the-box God pitches up to judge me.

  Jabulani hangs his head.

  – I shot a man yesterday. You saw it, boy. I feel zero regret. No guilt. No fear of God. Check out my hand.

  He holds his hand out flat, level with the earth.

  – Still as a goddamn cadaver. Hey?

  – Still, master.

  – Now, tell me, why don’t I shoot you? Just for the hell of it.

  He forms a fist.

  – I hold your life in my hand, boy.

  – I have a wife and children. All I want is a job. I need to send money to them. If you let me go, master, I will walk away and forget I ever saw this place.

  He unfurls his fist to wag a finger at Jabulani.

  – But the thing is ... the thing is, you can’t forget my face.

  The other gunmen laugh jadedly and spit in the dust.

  – Tell you what I do. I let you job on this farm. I let you live. I give you beer. So maybe for you there is a God. Now, I think you’ve been rude to this girl. She has beautiful tits and yet you look down at your feet.

  Jabulani shuffles his feet.

  – Look at her.

  Jabulani tilts his head up. He feels his isinjonjo go hard and shifts his hands to hide it.

  – Your cock can’t lie. You want her. Now I want you to go down on all fours and howl for her. Howl like a dog at the moon.

  Jabulani glances at the other Zimbabweans. They all have their eyes on him. Jonas nods at him.

  Jabulani goes down and lets out a wavering, wistful yelp.

  Scarface kicks him in the ribs.

  Now Jabulani, teacher of Orwell and Achebe, howls his pain, his fury, his sorry lust in this godless dust.

  15

  HERMANUS. DUSK.

  I mosey along through the emptying market square. I realise I have not penned a poem in a long time. It’s as if the world, however vivid, swims and sways before me too elusively to pin down on paper: telegraph lines shiver like guitar strings, the sea swings, seagulls hem and haw, the earth quivers all day under the sun. Yet each line I put down feels flat, stale, stalled.

  Men of all colours huddle round a motorcar radio to tune in to the cricket. An English wicket falls and they dance and high-five and sing out HOWZAAAT! In this country we rob, shoot and burn each other ... until a cricket ball or rugby ball or football sends us into a shindig of sudden camaraderie and hooting and vuvuzela tooting.

  After the high of beating the West Indies last Christmas, South Africa has had a jinxed year. We lost to Sri Lanka and India.

  I catch sight of her at a pub table on the front deck of the Burgundy. Somehow I sense the guy she’s with is her lover.

  The umbrellas flap and jig in the wind as if they too are following the cricket. They feel zero empathy for my sudden sorrow.

  I sit at a free table next to theirs. I wonder if she’ll recognise me from the market, but she’s scrutinising the tea bag floating in her china teacup.

  HE: Hey, Lotte. You just happened to be there.

  Lo-tte. A ballooning gasp of longing tied off with the tip of his tongue.

  She fishes the tea bag out of her cup and pinches it unflinchingly between two fingers.

  SHE: I felt he wanted to tell me something.

  HE: But that’s absurd.

  SHE: I was the last thing he saw.

  She shifts her teacup from palm to palm. Her gaze flickers over me.

  HE: Focus now, Lotte.

  He catches her hands in his.

  HE: Come to Jozi with me.

  Jozi, Johannesburg. Jazzy yet risky. A hip war-zone.

  SHE: I won’t be caged behind a razor-wired wall. Besides, I can’t paint in Jozi.

  She draws her hands away and clinks the teacup down on the saucer.

  SHE: I need the sea.

  He farts air through his pressed lips. Evidently he scorns the whims of artists who hang on such ethereal things as muses and vibe.

  HE: Look ... I want you to lie low till the weekend. Till I come again.

  SHE: Lie low?

  HE: Yesterday you had a foreigner’s blood on your feet. Today some psycho fucked with your frangipani. I’m not superstitious ... but perhaps they are signs.

  SHE: I thought it was magic.

  I grin like a dork.

  HE: Magic? Black magic, maybe. If you stay I forbid you to walk alone along the sea path beyond Kwaaiwater, or to swim in the tidal pool at the crack of dawn.

  SHE: Al, I love that path. I love to walk all the way to the lagoon. And I love the pool then. If you weren’t always so wiped out we’d swim together.

  Al. Maybe she’s drawn to guys with curt names. She’ll be spooked by my litany of vowels.

  HE: It’s not forever. Once I’ve done the paperwork for this Taiwan deal, things will plateau out. I can handle things from this end then. We’ll marry and have a baby ...

  Under my feet: pebbles, a wine cork, bottle tops, cigarette ends, an oyster shell.

  SHE: A girl.

  HE: We’ll tie her hair in pigtails.

  SHE: We’ll let her hair fall free.

  HE: We’ll dress her in jeans so she can skip and climb like a boy.

  SHE: She’ll wear a dress she tucks into her panties when she skips. And she won’t care if boys see her panties when she’s climbing. You want to curb her freedom when she’s not even born yet. And you’ll tell me I have to hide my breasts under a cloth if I nurse her in a café. You
sound Muslim. Or American.

  He just sulks for pity.

  Lotte sends me a flicker of a smile, fleeting and ephemeral. Perhaps I imagined it. She spills sugar on the table and draws her finger through it. She frowns to figure out where she’s seen me before.

  A cockroach feather-foots over my foot to zero in on the sugar. I shudder.

  Twin boys stand in front of the restaurant deck. They bow. One boy plays a tune on a Zulu hosepipe flute, and then words from Papageno’s aria fly from the mouth of the other boy, words like dipping, flitting birds eluding the bird catcher.

  Al tosses all the jingling small change from his pockets into their hat.

  I fid a coin in my pocket.

  They bow again and go into the orange light.

  HE: Come to Jozi with me, Lotte. I beg of you.

  I free my guitar and pluck the strings.

  Lotte remembers now. She smiles at me and blows the sugar away.

  I twang my desire for her.

  Al slurps spilt liquid from his saucer.

  SHE (laughing): Remind me why I love you, Al Pike.

  HE: Because you need never be scared when I’m with you. And you’ll never go begging. Besides, I swept you off your feet, didn’t I?

  SHE: You did?

  HE: I did. And I gave you a flashy rock. See it catch the sun.

  He holds her hand and swivels her ring so the diamond flashes like a lit fuse.

  HE: You belong to me.

  My plucking fades out.

  SHE: Do I?

  HE: You do.

  They kiss.

  I pinch a ten-rand note under my coffee cup.

  A Tuareg four-by-four hoots at me as I jaywalk to the cliff path. I go down the steps to the old harbour. On the way down I pick red canna flowers. I fling the petals into the water of the harbour and see them float to form a question mark.

  Is there no cure for this fever in my blood?

  I sit on the harbour wall and play my guitar hard. The waves of a listless sea clap dully against the wall.

  Seagulls mock me from the rickety salting poles where fishermen hang fish out to dry.

  – Isn’t she beautiful? I cry.