– Beautiful, hey? chirps Jake.
– Beautiful. I wish they could see this.
– Your wife and kids? One day they will.
Jabulani shakes his head and laughs a hissing laugh.
– Hey. It may be a pipe dream now, but you were born under a lucky star. I feel it in my bones.
How, Jabulani wonders, will this pipe dream convert to reality? Another man has put fish and chips in his hands. He wears this man’s shirt and jeans. He has no good shoes and not a cent to his name.
He flicks chips to the fussing, flapping seagulls. They swoop and catch midair.
To him the seagulls look like white crows. He imagines Panganai plucking his guitar and the seagulls diving to catch fragments of Marley.
And Jabulani dreams: There’ll be sunshine and wine and jokes and he’ll put his hands over Tendai’s eyes and she’ll peek through his fingers.
– Hey, Jabulani. A mate has a gig tonight. I said I’d go. You can come along and I’ll foot the bill for a few beers. And maybe I can find you a room with one of my mates. You see, my flat’s just a box. And my girlfriend’s writing her thesis and ...
Jabulani bends his head.
– She’s funny that way. She needs her karmic space.
Jabulani sees how naive it was of him to imagine this guy would wave a magic wand and conjure a roof and a job for him.
– It’s not that you’re black. She’d just get weirded out by my pitching up with a refugee. I’m sorry.
– Hey, you have ferried me to Cape Town for no money. You have risked your life for me. You have revived my hope. I will never forget you.
– I’ll just call in at the flat and then pick you up again. Stay where you are. Ja? I won’t be long. And I’ll lend you shoes. You look like a palooka in those things.
Now he’s back-pedalling to the van.
– You just stay put. Ja?
When Jake pitches up with a gift of rugby jersey and white Havaianas flip-flops, Jabulani has vanished.
Jake parks off on the rocks, rolls a jay, and hangs his head and smokes that jay dead.
The frangipani-sweet fragrance of the marijuana drifts to where Jabulani hides.
Then Jake flicks the jay stub away and gets down from the rocks. He hangs the jersey over the railing, puts the flip-flops down. Then he yells:
– Good luck, Freedom!
Then he’s gone.
Jabulani unwinds the bandage from his hand. He strips down to his jeans and wades into the sea. The jaggy pink bullet wound in his hand stings like blazes. It feels as if he’s rubbing a chilli into it. Yet he holds his hand under, so the salt can heal. It stings so sore he hardly notices the footnote sting of the cut in his foot. Then the cold numbs the pain and he yields to the giddy high of having made it to Cape Town.
Now he’s a boy in the sea, laughing as the waves flip over him.
He stays on the bench in the waning light till the wind blows his skin dry. Then he tugs on the rugby jersey. The dry salt on his skin catches slightly on the fabric. It smells of jasmine.
So subtly had their life become pared down to the bone over that last half-year in Zim. No flowery-smelling liquid to follow the Omo into the spinning drum, no sugar to sweeten the cheap coffee, no Johnnie Walker to dull the white noise of worry in his head.
He tears his old shirt and binds a strip of the cloth around his hand. He ties off the cloth with his teeth. He hoop-shoots a rubber clog at a wire bin on a lamp post. He scores. Then the other. This one dances on the rim before falling in. He interprets this as another good omen and smiles.
25
HERMANUS NEW HARBOUR. AFTER dusk.
Buyu and I and the bus boys dangle feet from the harbour wall among hand-liners and languid lovers. They swig ice-cold Coca-Cola from cans and gnaw Kentucky off the bone. They throw bones to begging dogs and chips to cussing gulls.
From the gunwales of moored fishing boats cormorants forlornly eye us like some sorry Greek chorus. They spurn a flutter of fish tails under the hulls of the fishing boats.
The chief of the barefoot outcasts, in his dirty Kangol hat and boy-soldier shades, vows he’ll keep his eyes peeled for dog hunters.
Buyu hangs out with the bus boys on the harbour wall while I play old standards on my guitar for tourists and old fogeys in a shacky joint called Quayside Cabin. I wonder if Zero would view old standards (Hotel California, Bad Moon Rising, Sweet Home Alabama) as trading goods.
The kitchen’s in an old shipping container. From the roof hang fishing floats and other flotsam and funky junk. The girl waiters wear orange shirts. They are as boyish as hockey girls.
I play for free calamari and chips and tips. I play till my fingertips sting.
At midnight I find Buyu alone on the hull of a capsized trawler in dry dock. We share the calamari and chips. I think of my one-man play. It was staged in a dry dock at the Cape Town waterfront. It was interspersed with the barks of seals and the jeers of gulls.
A seal on the slipway honks at us and we flick him a bit of calamari. He just sniffs at it in a smirky way. He wants his fish raw. He slides sullenly into the harbour.
We lie down on the hull. Scorpio forms a stippled question mark on the blackboard of the sky.
– Buyu, I’m in love with a green-eyed girl.
– Where’s she?
– Here in Hermanus.
– How come you hide her from me?
– She has a boyfriend.
– Shit.
– Yeah. Shit. I’m hooked, man. I’m bleeding, I tell you.
– No other girl is good?
– It’s not girl. It’s her.
– Then you have to catch her.
– How? I play my guitar and you dance like a monkey?
– I’m not your monkey.
– Sorry. It was a joke.
– Tell me her name.
I waver, scared the magic in her name will fade if I say it to another.
– Lotte.
– Lo-ta. Good for a song, hey?
I sigh.
– You go play again before they fire you.
When I come out again, I have a bottle of beer for me and a Fanta for Buyu and money in my pocket. It feels good to have earned the money, for the market takings are, at the end of the day, another of my old man’s handouts.
A hunter’s moon hangs over the harbour.
I sing and strum Moonshadow for Buyu. The sting in my fingertips is the sting of longing for Lotte.
A young whale blows in the harbour.
Buyu is up on his feet, dancing on the arced hull.
– Play, play, he cries. That whale, she loves your guitar.
Now I too am dancing on the hull under the moon, singing to a whale, wishing I had a way to tune into his undersea poetry.
The few folk still lingering over an espresso or a Don Pedro come helter-skeltering out of Quayside Cabin. They flash cameras and howl a hullabaloo till the whale dives and is gone.
Buyu and I ride the Vespa along the potholed roads of Zwelihle township. Hardly human figures slide along sandy paths through a maze of wonky tin-roofed shacks or hold hands out to the star-sparks of a brazier. Skinny dogs stalk the flickering firelight and bark at us out of the dark, but none look at all akin to a yellow, fat-gut lab. A whore slants against the door frame of a shack, advertising firelit skin. Two swaying men sing an off-key karaoke to a song on a radio: a yearning and sorrow no hooker can cure.
The fire and the dark, the moon and the sea, they tango on and on.
On the other side of the road sits one lone, tilting bivouac in a wasteland lot of cracked glass and wire snakes and half bricks. Maybe the hideout of a sangoma, a medicine man.
Or of a man whittled down to the bone by The Virus. Another snubbed, sidelined soul. It was always thus. It has yet to happen.
26
LONG STREET, CAPE TOWN.
Jabulani figures all the foreigners have a gig on the go. Glib-tongued traders sell marijuana, second-hand iPods, fa
ke Ray-Bans and bootleg films from India. One capering fellow lures motorcars into parking bays with theatrical hand signals. Another wipes windows of motorcars free of sea salt and butterfly flecks. Another has revived the dead art of the shoeblack. Yet another dude in dirty dreads sounds his didgeridoo on a street corner, a haunting drone pervaded randomly by gull shouts and hooting and the clang of a church bell.
The world smells of sea and coffee and clammy skin and fallen flowers. And, absurdly, of hope. However dirt poor you are, however long since Lady Luck smiled on you, something in this town tells you that your fortunes may change at the drop of a hat.
He goes from bar to bar, coffee shop to coffee shop, bookshop to bookshop, in a bid to find a job. Again and again he is spurned. He can tell some folk find it forward of him to seek a job handling books and paper, china and teaspoons as a skint black man. They frown at his duds. Smirk at his flip-flops. They are wary of the litany of highbrow words at his fingertips. And warier still of his crook hand.
At the Long Street Bar he begs for a glass of water. A surly barman taps water into the glass and tells him to drink it outside, out on the pavement. Eyes at the bar glare low and leery over cold beer. He goes out and casts his eyes to the mountain. From this angle it is a vast iron anvil and it bears down on him, squeezing air from his lungs. He draws in a draft of dry berg wind chased by a swig of lukewarm water. No ice for him. He wants to fling the glass down on the paving to see shards scatter and blink in the sun. Instead he skulks through the bar gloom again and bows as he hands the man the glass. The eyes of the beer swiggers sweep him out.
He unwinds the cloth from his shot hand to air the wound.
A posse of Nigerians in tweed caps hangs out outside a bottle store. Their hands are never still. They shuffle wads of money, they flip and catch coins, they twiddle Rizla paper between thumbs and trigger fingers, they thumb lighter wheels to spit fire, they text one-handedly, their thumbs game-boying over the keys. When they catch him staring, one of them tells him to piss off and spits at him.
Jabulani is gobsmacked by this spat venom.
The spitter draws a knife and runs the back of the blade along his throat.
Jabulani spins on his heels and hotfoots it down Long Street in the goofy, jerky tempo of a silent movie.
The Nigerians fling jeers after him that may not crack his bones yet sting like peach stones.
He weaves through the canvas-roofed stalls of Greenmarket Square, where they sell masks and drums and cloths and carved animals and other bazaar curios. They are from Gambia, Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania ... Timbuktu. White tourists who can’t tell one black from another are fooled into imagining it is all South African art. A bone peddler sells fly-specked bones piled on newspaper. A travelling barber plies his trade under a beach umbrella. A Chinese faf man sells luck from a box.
– Dream of the moon, you bet on 9. Dream of a dog, you bet on 27. Dream of pussy ... well then, you had your good time.
And it is then that he catches sight of a man whiter than any other. Ghost Cowboy standing in front of a stall that sells absurdly lanky giraffes carved out of wood in the Zimbabwean style.
Jabulani’s blood runs cold.
Ghost Cowboy screws his right thumb into the palm of his left hand to describe Jabulani’s stigmata hole to the stall keeper. Then he hands the man money and a scrap of paper. The man nods.
Jabulani slides his hands into his pockets and falls into a dead run along Shortmarket Street and then down Loop Street, where illegal aliens loll about, begging for jobs and smoking to kill time. He runs all the way down to the harbour, where seals slide into the sea as seagulls carp and tourists gawp and fishing boats bob shadowlessly under a zenith sun.
27
HERMANUS MARKET.
The scent of Hunter’s rooibos tea reminds me of my mother reading to me in Amsterdam (Of Mice and Men, The Old Man and the Sea) and how she never folded down the corners but marked how far she’d read with a guineafowl feather instead. And how I begged her to tell me of South Africa and she’d tell me that if you filtered it all down you ended up with a blue sea and flower sellers in Adderley Street and snoek fishermen in Hout Bay and Zulu rickshaw men in Durban ... and a hole dug by diamond hunters. All things spinning around a deep, deep plughole.
And always, rooibos tea and frangipani and the giddy smell of the sea.
And though the words and images eluded her, the murmuring cadences of my mother’s voice sent my sister drifting into tulip-vivid dreams.
I am joggled out of reverie by her heading this way, by the swishing whisper of flouncy fabric against her skin, and by the telltale outline of a tanga.
Buyu follows her like a dog. For a moment I fear he’ll sniff at her ass. I wonder how he senses this is her, my seagull girl.
– Hey. I heard you play your guitar the other day, in front of the Burgundy. And I was wondering ...
A fermata: an unbearably sustained note.
– ... if you’d play for me this Friday.
My heart goes haywire like a rat in a box.
Buyu nods frenziedly and hops from foot to foot behind her tangaed ass.
Words find it tricky to travel through my dry gullet:
– For ... you? Just for you ... alone?
She laughs that killing, pearly laugh again.
– I’m having a party. A few folk are coming out from Cape Town.
My heart flick-flacks. She’s inviting me to her party!
– I thought it’d be cool to have live music.
Fool. She’s not inviting me to hang out with her. She just wants me to amuse her friends. This casts me in another undefined limbo: I’ll be neither guest nor servant. In a word, the problem of being coloured in South Africa under apartheid.
– How much do you charge?
Buyu’s flicking his fingers to signal mucho mucho money.
– I play at Quayside for tips.
– He charges five hundred a throw. He’s good, Hunter pipes up.
– Five hundred?
I glare at Hunter.
– We can haggle ... if you want, I tell Lotte.
Zero’s Survival Tip #2. Moffied down.
– He’d sell his mother for a pittance, Hunter flippantly footnotes.
Lotte squints her eyes. Amused? Bemused? Hard to tell.
– What kind of music do you play?
– All kinds, punts Buyu.
– I play folk rock. Indie, I’d say. I love The Black Keys. And I can do reggae.
– Can you play any Wilco?
– Just ‘Kamera’, from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
– Hey. You’re tuned in.
– Tuned into what? Hunter quips in her wisecrack way.
– To find my place you just follow the path from the harbour towards Kwaaiwater. Come along after the market shuts down. You’ll see fairy lights hanging in the yard. And a flowering frangipani.
I act witless to hide the fact that I have voyeured into her frangipani yard from the cover of milkwoods.
– Cool.
– Hey, I don’t know your name.
– Jerusalem.
She arcs a brow.
– Jerusalem?
– You may call me Jero, if you’d rather. My old man does.
– No. Jerusalem’s magic. There’s music in it.
I feel as if a blade fan is spinning in my head. Or a seabird flapping his wings. Whhhoooff. Whhhoooff. Whhhoooff.
28
LONG STREET, CAPE TOWN. Another day.
Jabulani breathes in a fusion of sea tang, coffee fumes and pigeon funk. He dodges the sassy boys who flick blades and barbs at him. He keeps his hands in his pockets and his eyes peeled for Ghost Cowboy.
He drifts among the skirted and spurned, the spat-on and burned, among the soot-handed and dust kissed: the flotsam of Africa forever waiting for Godot among pigeon feathers and fag stubs and dream shards, forever condemned to a gutter limbo. A hapless aura hangs off them like a tatty shadow.
Followed by th
eir dazed eyes, he fears he’ll end up as just such a gutter zombie, for he lacks a cocky faith in his fate. If Thokozile had not spurred him on, he’d never have embarked on this jinxed journey.
On another frequency he overhears fragments of frivolous café dialogue about films and music, about The Beach and Coldplay, about Tarantino and Oasis. To them, the mojito sippers and sushi junkies, the cursed and huddled are invisible. They tune out the jabberings of the beggars and prophets. They are as cool and aloof in their cooled cafés and capsuled bars as the white window dummies flaunting fine dresses his wife has never had money for.
He sees a stray dog pissing against a bicycle festooned with bags full of flotsam and junk.
He idly stares at a stub-footed man in aviator goggles jabbing a fist at the raging sun.
Echoes of his Zimbabwe waylay him. A woman with hair cornrowed like Thokozile’s holding a newspaper as a parasol. A penga beggar crooning Bob Marley into the mouth of a beer bottle like a love-mad pigeon. A song by Zimbabwean singer Tuku on the radio. Warped figures sculpted from Zimbabwean stone lurking in a cool café courtyard. Jigsaw words in Ndebele painted on alley walls. The crazy laugh of a hoopoe, the bird they call hleka mfazi in his lingo. A young Zimbabwean called Zola catching a shaft of sun after a weekend in jail for loitering. Somehow between van and jail he had lost a shoe.
Jabulani and Zola and maybe a million other Zimbabwean interlopers all hustling for a foot in the door, for a handful of sand to put a shack on, for the freedom not to have to glance over your shoulder all the time.
At noon a cannon sounds on Signal Hill and folk down tools. Bricklayers and street sweepers lie flat on the pavement of Loop Street to doze.
Jabulani fishes a newspaper out of the bin to rest his head on. Then he too lies down flat on Loop and gazes up at the mountain. Up on slopes, beyond Jabulani’s range of sight, stoned bergies hide from the burning sun under foraged skins of tarp. Jabulani’s eyelids fall. Red sunlight flares through his thin lid-skin, so he turns his head to the side. He’s about to glide into dream when a furry tail tickles his face. He smiles when he sees it’s just a squirrel, not a feral dog or some furry demon. And it is then that the article in the paper under his head catches his eye.
Cruel Crazy Beautiful World Page 9