Then for a whole hour Cat is like nearly dead with nerves, because she’s so scared they might lose it or damage it or something, so she can’t stand still and she just keeps on riding up and down on the escalators. Up and down. And she goes all round the different avenues inside the centre. In the basement she buys this packet of Rolos and rips it open and sticks three in her mouth all at once, but then she spits them all out into the litter bin and chucks out the rest of the packet as well. But then she goes back after about a minute and picks out the packet. After that, she empties all the sweets one by one into the bin, and pokes them right down to the bottom, underneath this kind of revolting old smeary carton of takeout chicken tikka that somebody’s dumped, just to make sure she won’t be able to go back for them.
After that she just keeps on buying more and more bottles of fizzy spring water and pouring it down her throat, like Lettie’s beautician said to do. She even looks at all the boring old ladies’ ‘needlecraft’ stuff and the shop with household goods like posh tin openers and juicers, because she’s starting to get scared that Michelle and them might get out of school a bit early and be hanging around the clothes shops or the cafés on the floors higher up.
And when she finally goes back, after what feels like about five hours, they tell her sorry, but it’ll be another half-hour. Shit! Anyway, she says that’s OK, though she’s practically pissing herself that maybe they’ve lost it or something, and they’re not saying, but she’s got no choice. So finally, she’s just got to sneak into Truworth’s, so she can check herself out in the full-length mirrors, with the new hair and the black jeans and all, and then she tries on these crap jeans that aren’t nearly as good as the ones Lettie bought her and they make her stomach stick out. Oh yuk.
And then, finally – finally – at bloody last, and after another bottle of spring water – she goes back and, phew, they haven’t lost the book or anything, and all the photocopies look seriously fantastic. They look exactly like the real ones. So then they put everything in a plastic bag, even the book, and she sticks it all in her portfolio and she pays them, like millions of rand, and then she’s zooming up the escalator, worried as hell, because she’s been cutting it all a bit fine, and she’s got maybe half an hour before the tenant gets back and it’ll be getting dark already, even though it’s like all sparkle-sparkle inside the shopping centre.
Anyway, she suddenly looks up and there are these two people just passing her on the going-down escalator and they’re staring at her like really hard with their mouths wide open like goldfish and it’s Michelle and Alan. And there she is, looking right through them, with her new black eyelashes and her feathery black hair and the uplift bra and the Armani jeans and all, and carrying a black portfolio, like she was an art student or something, and they’re just looking like dumbo schoolkids in their crappy uniforms, and Michelle’s like got her skirt all hitched up at the waist, which is supposed to make her look sexy, but all it means is you can like see these two fat knees and how short her legs are and Alan’s hair is looking all kind of yellow under the bright lights, that are like making his skin look really terrible as well.
So Cat’s feeling pretty OK once she’s finally made it back to the annexe, and she’s got the key in the lock, though she can’t see a thing, of course, and she’s feeling her way, like doing baby steps, carefully-carefully, across to the other side of the room where the desk is. Then she gets out the book, and puts it like exactly squared up on the corner just like it always is, with the bookmark and all, and then she’s just about to go when suddenly she needs to pee so badly, what with all the spring water and the hours of hanging around in the centre, she realises she’s been practically holding it in all day and that she’s about to wet her pants any second, so she does what she’s absolutely never done before. She goes for a wee in the tenant’s bathroom. I mean she’s been in the bathroom before where it’s got all this lovely pale-green glass, like a green-glass washbasin and stuff, and with his wash lotions that say ‘per uomo’, but she’s never ever actually dreamed of using his lav, like right now, when she’s got her jeans and her pants around her ankles and she’s thinking, Oh my God and hurry up, hurry up, HURR-EE UP, because this pee is going on and on and on for ever. And then she’s just about to flush and hoick up her pants, when she hears this weird noise.
But seriously weird noise. Like tap-tap, tap-tap-tap. And it’s coming from right behind her, like from up on the wall near the lavatory cistern, because it’s one of those high-up ones. So now she can’t even flush, of course, because she’s too scared to make a sound. Oh shit! And now he’ll know it’s her, because boys don’t need to use loo paper when they pee and who else could it be except for her? The dumbo girl that like stares at him out of the bathroom window, because the other day she could swear he looked up and saw her watching him. Or maybe not? Anyway, right now, she’s literally shaking as she’s trying to pull up the Lycra magic pants that have gone into a kind of tight, scrambled-up ring, like they do when you’re in a hurry – of course – and she’s trying to yank up her jeans as well, but like just at the same time she’s turned to face the wall behind her, where the sound’s coming from. And then she’s holding her breath and – Oh my God, she’s thinking – I’m out of here, right now, but then something really weird starts to happen.
There’s just a bit more light there in the bathroom than in the rest of the place, because there’s like this long, high-up window that faces on to the side street and so there’s this slightly orangey street light glow in there and, in the beam of light, Cat can see that little bits of plaster are fluttering down from the wall and they’re falling on to the lid of the loo seat, that she’s just closed really quietly, and some of it is even falling on her.
And then there’s like a little shiny tip of metal coming through the wall, like a chisel or the point of a knife or something. It’s a bit like in that story about the knives in the walls that close in on you. And suddenly Cat can’t help it but she just starts to scream. She’s standing sort of stuck to the spot in her snaggled-up magic pants, and she’s screaming so loud that she doesn’t even hear the crash on the other side of the wall, or the groan that follows.
She’s standing, rigid, in the dark and screaming.
‘Mom-meee! Mom-meee!’
And Cat just can’t stop screaming.
Chapter Six
Jack
’You’ll be Giacomo Moroni,’ Hattie says. ‘I’m Hattie. Please come in. I’ll take you to the garden cottage.’
Jack hasn’t quite got used to being called Giacomo Moroni. It’s a recent nom de plume; a name of convenience. For so long now, he’s been Jacques: Jacques Moreau. Admittedly Eduardo, when in fatherly mood, had occasionally called him Giacomo, but then the name had come out sounding a whole lot more like Jack. ‘Jack-omo’. Now there is something that startles him about the extra syllable in the mouth of a native English speaker. He is not much accustomed to native English speakers. ‘You’ll be Gee-acc-omo,’ his landlady said. For the first time in his life, he has been travelling on a passport that calls him by his real name. Sipho Jack Maseko.
But his rented studio is a dream. It’s even nicer than it looked in the pictures.
‘It’s perfect,’ Jack says. ‘You’ve made it all so perfect.’
His eyes are taking in the black-brick floor tiles, diagonally scored; the narrow oblongs of roof window through which he can see a heavenly Magritte-blue sky. An African sky after the notorious grey skies of Milan. He takes in the slate worktop that runs the length of his shining new kitchen. And here, at the far end – the ‘sleeping’ end – are these lovely pale-wooden wall cupboards whose doors come uninterrupted by handles; doors that open at the touch with a satisfying push-click.
‘There’s just one thing,’ he says. ‘I have a desk. I would really love to have my own desk.’ Then he says, ‘Not that this one isn’t beautiful.’
He and Hattie are staring at Herman’s purpose-built desk table with its solid l
egs and chunky mortise joints. She knows that Herman will not be best pleased. The studio is a machine for living and Herman is god of the machine.
‘My desk is very special to me,’ Jack says. ‘It was left to me by a friend.’
‘Ah,’ Hattie says.
‘A friend who died,’ Jack says. ‘A benefactor.’
Hattie glances quickly at the tenant. Giacomo Moroni. He is young, tall, slim, light brown and very good-looking. He has close-cropped Afro hair and a beautifully shaped skull. He has those alluring eyes that come as one of the benefits of mixed-race parentage; eyes that look as if permanently enhanced with eyeliner. His lashes are long and black. He has the slightest hint of peachy glow across the cheekbones. Giacomo has the sort of pale Afro looks that modelling agencies go mad for. In addition, there is a lovely fluidity in his gesture and movement – something that Hattie appreciates. Inwardly she’s speculating that the ‘friend’, the ‘benefactor’, could have been a partner who died of Aids. In which case, how dreadful for the poor young man, especially at his age, because Giacomo looks too young to be a member of staff in the drama department, even in the humblest junior capacity; more like an undergraduate. He certainly looks younger than his twenty-seven years. Could it be that the friend was an older woman who loved him in a motherly way? She can tell that older women will fall for Giacomo; will long to nurture him; to put themselves out for him. Right now she’s doing it herself. Yet his body language is unambiguous. It says to her, ‘Touch me not.’
‘But of course,’ she says. ‘Of course you must have your own desk. It’s no problem.’
And she thinks, What the hell, Herman’s table can go in the garage – especially since he’s incorporated almost all of the one-time shed space into ‘the studio’. Or better still, she’ll have the beautiful desk table for herself. She’ll get it hauled up to her study in the turret – that’s if the legs will manage the last bend in the stairs. Then, by the time Herman returns, he will be confronted with a fait accompli. The desk will replace her brother’s old bureau, which allows her little space to spread. The latter can go in the drawing room. Or maybe she’ll flog it? Dispatch it to an antiques auction? It’s time she got some practice in discarding elements of her past life.
‘Thank you,’ Jack says. ‘You’re very kind.’
The desk, his beautiful silver desk, is one of the few material possessions that have become important to him, though in general he carries little baggage. There is Josh’s old copy of Treasure Island along with a small box of books. There are the three engravings given him by Eduardo, along with his framed Giacometti poster. There is his Moka espresso pot and a bag of clothes. There is his pistachio-green Vespa, which is currently in transit on the high seas. He hasn’t seen the desk since he was nine years old but Bernie Silver’s desk still gleams there on the edges of his mind; a thing to focus on in this oddly familiar yet altogether different place. He can almost not wait to go and claim it. And it’s so amazing that, after all these years, after the deaths and disappearances and God knows what, his desk should still be there waiting for him – as confirmed by a recent phone call from Milan. It’s exactly where Bernie left it; at the university, in social studies.
Bernie’s old room is currently occupied by a Professor Nathan Lewis and it is he who was able to make Jack aware that both Ida and Bernie were dead. The academic staff will doubtless have changed several times; persons moved on as part of the global diaspora; the anti-apartheid brain drain. Some retired to one-bedroom flats in Marylebone or Montmartre. Some working for human rights on the West Bank, or in Sierra Leone. Some in Perth or Auckland or Winnipeg. Some heading Cambridge colleges, or chairing committees of the British Medical Association. Yet the desk is still there, its large adhesive label apparently intact within the top right-hand drawer. ‘This desk is a present from Bernard Silver to Sipho Jack Maseko. To await collection. He may be quite some time.’
‘Thank you,’ Jack says again to Hattie. ‘It is quite big, you see.’ And he smiles his rare but enchanting smile.
‘You’re very welcome,’ Hattie says, making as if to withdraw. ‘I’ll leave you to get settled.’
With his elegant manners, his fluent but somehow unplaceable English, Hattie takes Herman’s tenant for a Euro child, a child of sweet first-world privilege; father a diplomat, mother an art dealer, international schools in Geneva and Prague – something like that. Well, you’ve only got to look at his shoes.
‘Let me know if there is anything you need,’ she says.
Each morning over those first few days, as Jack surfaces to a hundred bird calls and to that slice of bright subtropical sky, his first half-awake thoughts are all of Dakar. Then he remembers where he is and he thanks God for the studio. It’s really quite weird to be back here, but he has always loved a few beautiful spaces. He recalls, to his puzzlement, that his landlady had referred to the studio as ‘the garden cottage’. A ‘garden cottage’, as he has already discovered, is a term much in local use for an upgraded one-time servants’ billet. For Jack a cottage is a literary concept, having to do with northern Europe; a picturesque, timber-beamed minihouse, as depicted in those illustrated fairy stories that he long ago read with Josh; a low rustic dwelling, dwarfed by a charming topknot of thatch; wild eglantine and beanstalks clawing at tiny leaded windows. And a witch lurking within, bent double over a cauldron.
Witches in hovels he does know about from his own too personal experience and it’s thanks to his hag-like grandmother, who had dominion over him in ‘the native reserve’; the horror time that carved three years out of what, until then, he had assumed was his rightful childhood at the Silvers’ suburban house. They were years that changed him for ever; years that taught him the ugliness of want and the indignity of ever disclosing emotional need. The hag is probably long dead. Ditto his mother, who abandoned him there at the age of six. He does not know for sure, of course, and frankly he cares less. Good riddance to them both. Gertrude, who dumped him, and the witch, who shook her broom at him; a broom with which she would rearrange the dust of the hovel’s wretched mud floor. Do not think of it, Jack Maseko aka Jacques Moreau. Do not go there.
Jack loathes the imperfections that poverty brings; its power to bend the spine, roughen the hands, blacken and loosen the teeth, make for rheumy eyes and pinched, lopsided cheeks. He loathes its power to compel co-existence with cockroaches and bugs; with mosquito bites and stomach cramps and intestinal worms; its power to bring on birth defects: club feet, untreated squints, blindness and withered legs. But here and now, his studio – this lovely space – is no cottage. The studio is a haven of artful, filtered light. The studio is both perfect and perfectly monochrome. Well, that’s except for the cool greenish tinge to the bathroom’s translucent glass fittings.
Standing, as it does, at the end of a fabulous garden, hidden from the main house by a hedge of tall bamboo, the studio has bougainvillea and a passion fruit vine clambering up a plastered wall that borders his terrace. Azaleas grow on his terrace in large clay tubs and those flowers that he remembers as red-hot pokers. Jack appreciates the privacy and the dimensions of the studio, because in the past he has either lived in cramped back rooms or he has shared. First there was the bunk bed, where he slept above his mother in the Silvers’ backyard room. Then there was his grandmother’s hovel where five of them slept on the floor. After that there was boarding school; then his five square metres in a storeroom at the back of a baker’s shop in Dakar. Living with Eduardo was always rather deluxe – whether the holiday house in Senegal that overlooked the sea, or the apartment in Milan – but his bedroom in either place was always next door to the two little boys. Bastiano and Vincenzo, his pupils. So the studio, for all his complex misgivings, is a sort of paradise. A place all his own and undefiled.
On his first afternoon there, Jack, having walked the distance to the local shopping mall and back, bakes biscuits in his small new oven – four almond cookies on a baking sheet twenty centimetres square – and he eats
them, two and two, sitting out at his garden table on the terrace. The first two, he eats at 4 p.m., with a wide white cup of mint tea. Then, as the light goes, he eats the second two, dipping them into a glass of chilled Vin Santo; or a delicious local version of Vin Santo that he’s bought in the ‘bottle store’. That’s what people used to call those places; those shops in which black persons were forbidden to buy alcohol. The Vin Santo is from a Cape wine estate called Klein Constantia and it tastes of flowers and apricots. It tastes of honey and marmalade. It tastes the way he remembers the contents of Ida Silver’s fridge.
An avocado and a pawpaw tree are visible to him, heavy with fruit, over the vista of low neighbourhood roofs. He’s taken aback by the unremembered lushness of this place, his once-upon-a-time home town; by the depth of its shiny greens. Jack is aware that his studio would once have been a shed-like row of basic rooms to house domestic servants. And where his green-glass bathroom is, there would have been a concrete appendage with utility cold shower and hole-in-the-floor flush toilet. His sloping slate roof with its oblong inlets of glass would once have been sheets of corrugated tin with gaps that let in mosquitoes and spiders, along with that fierce, slanting rain. The interior walls would all have been black with paraffin smoke from rickety Primus stoves. He knows – albeit sketchily, because his mother, being taciturn, never furnished him with detail – that it was from a servant’s room in a grand sort of house like this one that, long ago, she was evicted and sent packing. He knows that this happened shortly before he was born. He knows that, afterwards, she went to work at the house of Bernie and Ida Silver, where he’d spent his early childhood. That was before his horror time in the witch’s hovel, of course. And, after that – after his rescue – the Silvers packed him off to boarding school, and he never saw any of them again. Bernie, on that last day, drove him as far as the Swaziland border, where one of the school staff members was waiting to pick him up.
Sex and Stravinsky Page 16