Sex and Stravinsky

by Barbara Trapido

  By halfway through the bottle, the poet was pushing aside the lamb shank on his plate. He was giving his audience an extended lesson in the care of his exquisite hair. He washed his hair like this, like that, he explained; never like that, like this. He combed it always exactly so. Never, ever, like so. And the only comb he had always to use – please to note – was this one. Observe. This was the only one he had always about his person. The comb was made of ivory. The teeth were of exactly such a depth; of such a width; spaced precisely so; the handle never too short; never too long. Always exactly so. To be used – observe – like this. The poet’s hair made an attractive halo around his head. He would have no truck with braids; even less with extensions. Never! His hair was all his own.

  Miss Lundy had begun to yawn.

  ‘Jack,’ she said finally. ‘Jack.’ She spoke in whispers as they coincided in her kitchen. ‘I’m really sorry to ask this of you, but do you think you could get our guest to his room before he collapses here on me?’

  So Jack, with his arm around the poet’s waist, the poet’s arm across his shoulders, proceeded with caution, step by step, along the path to the guest room across the garden and he wrestled Jacques in through the door. But the poet, suddenly upright, looked about him with interest. He resumed his state of animated wakefulness. He became coercively affable.

  ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Jack, please to sit.’

  But Jack kept on standing. He saw that, on the bedside table, the poet had a second whisky bottle, which he soon began to uncap. He gathered a tumbler and a plastic mug from the bathroom, filled both, and took a hefty swig. He scrabbled within a cabin bag, from which he pulled out more poetry.

  ‘Écoute-moi,’ he said.

  The poems were long and boring and Jack was very tired.

  ‘Come,’ the poet said, looking up in time to see him yawn. He was patting the bed beside him. ‘Pretty boy,’ he said.

  ‘What?! ’ Jack said; touch-me-not Jack.

  He took a step backwards towards the door, but the poet was quick to intercept him.

  He was on his feet and breathing into Jack’s right ear.

  ‘I know why you are here,’ he said, and his breath, with its stale, grainy odour, was not unlike the smell of Jack’s grandmother’s home-made beer – albeit that the grains had been twelve years in the barrel.

  Jack gave the poet a forceful shove, which had him tottering backwards, but he landed, quite softly, on the bed. For something like five seconds, he looked nonplussed. Then his expression changed to anger. He rose and grabbed at both his travel bags. He threw in his few scattered items and closed the zips. He pulled on his leather jacket and tried, without success, to stuff the whisky bottle into one of its pockets. Then he snatched up the car keys.

  After that he turned to Jack.

  ‘I go,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Jack said. ‘You can’t.’

  ‘I do not stay,’ said the poet. ‘I go where I am – admire.’

  ‘Please –’ Jack said.

  ‘I,’ said the poet, somewhat pompously, thumping his own breast, ‘I am more better than Rimbaud. And Rimbaud, he is more better than Apollinaire. You will regret, mon ami. You will regret.’

  ‘Please,’ Jack said. ‘Stay. It’s dark.’ He hesitated to observe that the poet was too drunk to drive the car. ‘Where will you go?’ he said.

  ‘Mozambique,’ said the poet. ‘Bien sûr.’

  ‘Look,’ Jack said. ‘The roads aren’t great. There are mountains and wild animals. You know. Game reserves. Big animals.’

  The poet laughed. He darted forward and kissed Jack teasingly on the mouth; a brief assault of tongue and saliva that left Jack in shock.

  ‘Au revoir,’ he said and he was gone.

  Jack wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He bolted the door. Then he sat down, stunned, on the poet’s bed. He heard the car’s engine start up in the car park. He waited, hardly daring to breathe. No lights flicked on in the body of the school. Nobody appeared to wake. He saw a brief arc of light cross the wall of the gym as the car reversed out of the parking bay. Then he stretched out on the poet’s bed with his hands under his head; numb, corpse-like, appalled.

  ‘Shit!’ he mumbled. ‘Oh shit, what now?’

  He became aware that he was shivering and he wrapped himself in the poet’s duvet against the thin mountain air. Then he couldn’t stop yawning. His eyelids began to droop.

  And when he woke, his bed seemed strangely aligned and the room was full of daylight. Jack saw that he was still in his clothes and that his shoes were on his feet. He sat bolt upright and looked at his watch. Thanks be to God, it was actually not that late. He hadn’t even missed breakfast. If he was quick about it, he could slip out of the poet’s room and fall unobserved into the slipstream of school life. And then, in the bathroom where he went for a first morning pee, he had yet another surprise. Oh my God. The poet’s leather travel purse – a small, A5-sized item – was lying on the cistern. Alongside it, were the poet’s ivory comb and his tortoiseshell glasses. Inside the purse were his passport, his return air ticket between Dar es Salaam and Dakar, his Visa Card and seven hundred US dollars. There was also a small notebook containing addresses and telephone numbers. Jack swished water through his teeth. He stuffed all the items into the wallet. Then he strode out of the guest room and closed the door behind him. His first port of call would be the staff room, where he was in hopes of catching Miss Lundy.

  But something unscheduled was clearly going on. The school was not conforming to its usual morning routine. The teachers were not in the staff room. They were huddling in the foyer. There were two policemen in their midst and the talk was all of the poet. The car had been found, burnt out and turned over in a ditch. Material relating to the school – Miss Lundy’s material – scorched but not entirely illegible, had been found in the glove compartment. The poet was dead. Tickets, documents, personal effects were all irrelevant now. Jack moved off, not wanting to intrude. He stashed the travel purse in his locker and went to get himself some breakfast. Within the hour, the school had resumed its normal workaday schedule.

  Days went by and then weeks. Nobody asked about the poet’s documents; nobody raised a question. After a month, as Jack approached his sixteenth birthday, the passport and the ticket had become his precious, secret things. Had it not been for the poet’s effects, Jack’s next two years would have been running their predictable schoolboy course, but now December had become his deadline. The air tickets had been issued by Kenya Airways. The flight was from Dar es Salaam on 15 December. He knew that by then he would be in Tanzania and that his hair would be quite a bit longer. He knew that he would be in Dar es Salaam. He would have got there by crossing the border into Mozambique with the help of one Pedro, who was friends with everybody; Pedro, whose telephone number was contained within the poet’s small notebook.

  Before he inherited the documents, there was little chance that Jack, as a black South African, could have crossed and recrossed borders. But now he had an EU passport; one belonging to Jacques Moreau, a comparably pale-brown person; an Afro-French person of similar height, similar build. And Pedro, who owned a motorbike, would always have enough petrol. Over the next three months, as he brooded on his secret treasures, Jack made himself ready to become that other person. ‘Je m’appelle Jacques,’ he said. The utterance gave him much pleasure. It was, after all, what he had learned to say in Miss Lundy’s very first French class. It was an identity with which he was comfortable; a version of himself that he preferred. His preparations were meticulous. He worked even harder at French. He read Camus. He read Aimé Césaire. He worked his way through all Miss Lundy’s audio tapes from French radio. He watched French films. Then one day he made a trip into town and consulted with an optician. He had the poet’s glasses in his bag. The glasses were needed for a play, he said. He wanted plain glass in the frames.

  It was just at this time that Josh wrote suggesting that Jack might like to apply for a student visa for t
he UK; that, with Josh’s guidance and recommendation, he could submit the relevant application and put in for sources of funding. Naturally, this might involve making a journey with no return, but Jack might nonetheless like to consider it. Jack didn’t reply. France would have been another matter, but for the moment he had no interest in the Anglo-Saxon world. His focus was elsewhere. He was about to embark on another sort of journey with no possibility of return. He had read what he could about Chad and Mauritania and about the Côte d’Ivoire. He had read about Mali and Burkina Faso. Mostly he had read about Dakar. He could draw street plans of that city, from the avenue Pasteur to the Route de N’Gor; from the Stade Léopold Sédar Sénghor to the Pointe des Almadies. Though the poet’s air tickets were in his possession, he daydreamed, occasionally and just for fun, in a Boy’s Own sort of way, about taking the Bamako–Dakar railroad into the city all the way from Mali, or about making the journey by river in a dugout canoe. He knew all about the Île de Gorée and the art studios off the avenue Pompidou.

  Jack waited until the Christmas holidays, when he announced to his host family that he was off to spend a day in the library. Then he headed out on a tourist bus for the Lebombo Mountains that made the border with Mozambique; a young French traveller in tortoiseshell glasses, who travelled on an EU passport. At the border crossing he heard, with a small shiver of excitement, that people were speaking Portuguese; that strange sound, a bit like Spanish crossed with Russian. And Pedro was there to ease his transit. Jack rode pillion the short distance to the white beaches of Maputo, where, flashing down avenues of flame trees, they paused to eat giant prawns in the beautiful, crumbling shell of an old colonial hotel.

  Jack and his courier encountered little trouble as they hugged the coast, heading north. It was early days yet in the dirty-tricks war and they travelled almost unimpeded. They stopped at a series of enchanting small towns, each one edged with a sparkling turquoise sea. They proceeded, via pretty archipelagos, where they paused among reed houses and time-warped pastel villas for plates of peanut-and-cassava stew and bowls of boiled crabs. They made river crossings and skirted the national parks. They came upon a Makonde mask dance on the Ilha de Moçambique. And then they arrived at the Rovuma River, where Pedro came to a stop. Jack made the crossing without him, in – yes – a dugout canoe. And then he was on the Tanzanian border, where his visa was perfectly in order.

  ‘Welcome to our country,’ said the border guards, who spoke both English and Swahili. A bus took him into Dar es Salaam, where for three days Jack slept on the beach, living off bread and root-vegetable crisps that small boys sold him in paper cones made from used school jotters. The same small boys sold him cups of Arab coffee, brewed up on little camping burners. There was no way, even if he’d wanted to, that he could have visited Bernie and Ida Silver. He would have given himself away and, besides, he adored his isolation.

  Then he headed out on the airport bus for the Kenya Airways flight. Jack had never flown before and he didn’t know the procedure, but he knew that the plane would touch down in Nairobi, where certain passengers would alight. The airport, mercifully, was not very large and he was well on time. Once in the departure lounge, it was obvious to him which passengers were flying to Dakar. Everything about them was different. Their clothes were markedly different and they were speaking French or Wolof. Jack’s forearms goose-pimpled with excitement as he opted to get in line behind a man who was carrying a kora. And then he was in the air.

  Chapter Seven

  Caroline

  Having seen off her daughter on a three-week French exchange and her husband on a month-long trip to his one-time home town on the east coast of South Africa – a trip that will culminate in a conference on mime – Caroline, infallible, industrious Caroline; prodigious Caroline, has been making progress with her renovations to the family’s recently acquired Victorian terraced house; a house that is the realisation of her modest, graduate-student dreams, all those years ago. Two up, two down and a lean-to kitchen at the back.

  Within the week she has paint-stripped the window frames and the banisters, blow lamp in hand, and wearing a mask and goggles. Then she has waxed the exposed wooden surfaces. In the kitchen, where the furnishings are of sufficient an age to charm her rather than repel, she begins by sugar-soaping all the walls and the ceiling. Then she cleans up the old Belfast sink, with its nice wooden draining board, and she undertakes an invisible mend to a small chip in the glaze. Caroline removes several decades of grease from a pretty antique cooking stove, an electric item shaped like a Queen Anne cupboard on cabriole legs, but veneered in mottled enamel. There is something about old mottled enamel that always lifts her spirits, so she’s delighted to discover that all the stove’s parts still work.

  Making liberal use of the Spar shop’s Own Brand washing-soda crystals, she cleans up a 1950s blue-and-cream plywood dresser, its name fixed to the front in raised chrome cursive: ‘The Pantrix’. It has a pull-down, enamel-work surface with integral wooden bread board and several door panels made of dimpled glass. Prior to Caroline’s ministrations, it also has forty years of toast crumbs set in sausage grease, which coat all its outer surfaces. The kitchen’s open wooden shelves all exhibit a disgusting, glued-on compound: a sort of caramel substance in which several small insects have met their end. But Caroline, who enjoys a challenge, has a strong and splendid right arm.

  Next, she rips off the textured, swirly orange vinyl that covers the kitchen floor and is rewarded by the sight of old red quarry tiles beneath. All the same, it puzzles her that the red quarry tiles should themselves have been coated with red floor-paint. She removes the blistering paint without much trouble, before scrubbing, sealing and polishing the quarry tiles to a lovely, matt-brick richness. Then, covering the floor with two large groundsheets, she paints the kitchen ceiling white and the walls pale blue and cream, to match The Pantrix. Finally, she fixes a repro laundry rack on pulleys to the ceiling; a thing she has acquired from Scotts of Stow by mail order, and on it she hangs a miscellany of pots and pans, along with her ladles, whisks and colanders. The laundry rack is one of the very few items that Caroline has bought new – and it is with a touch of Ozzie feminist irritation that she takes note of its name. It’s called ‘The Sheila Maid’.

  Immediately outside the kitchen door is a small flagstone yard, which, with Pathclear and a sturdy garden broom, she transforms from its drain-and-dandelion dankness to a shady scented patio, with the help of her clematis and honeysuckle, and her several old fish kettles of kitchen herbs. Mint and parsley; marjoram and sage; fennel, rosemary and chives.

  Having previously employed a builder to knock through the two tiny ground-floor living rooms, the house, once dark and poky, is now filled with light, and the walls here and there are coated in new sepia plaster which reminds her of old walls in Rome. What a time it is since she has travelled anywhere – but upward and onward, Caroline! In the bathroom she removes the tacky hardboard bath panels to discover that her tub has pretty feet. She spends a morning treating patches of rust on its iron underside and, next day, paints the treated surfaces a soothing pastel grey. Meanwhile, having applied mould repellent to the walls and regrouted the white ceramic tiles, Caroline sets herself to papering the bathroom with three rolls of pale-grey Jane Churchill polka dots, which – being Caroline – she has found for thirty pence each in a basket of bin ends in the Red Cross charity shop.

  In the bedrooms she rips away the cladding from both the cast-iron fireplaces and sweeps up two dead starlings from one of the grates. She throws the pocky nylon carpets out of the front sash window, before gathering them up from the pavement and carting them off to the dump. Then she washes and undercoats the upstairs floorboards, before painting them pale grey. Meanwhile, she’s collected the floor sander she’s hired, complete with edging attachment, and, having checked the downstairs floors for loose nails, Caroline switches on the great roaring kidney-shaking machine and proceeds to sand the living-room floorboards.

  O
h dear! It is precisely because of the great roaring machine that she doesn’t hear the three calls from her mother to her mobile phone. Caroline’s mother has been phoning her daughter to complain of chest pains. Her ‘heartburn’, as she calls it, is getting worse. In between making attempts to reach her daughter, Caroline’s mother has been swallowing over-the-counter antacids in a peppy mix with blood-pressure tablets and her daily dose of Warfarin. Then, for good measure, she has taken all of it twice. And it’s because of the great roaring machine that Mrs McCleod, who has suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, lies for twenty-four hours, unobserved and unattended, in a heap alongside her bed in the house at Garden Haven. Because Caroline, after a day spent operating the sander, has driven back home to the bus up the Abingdon Road and has then, uncharacteristically, fallen asleep, exhausted, without checking her messages; without so much as washing her feet, or brushing her perfect white teeth.

  Caroline spends the following day finishing off her downstairs floors with the edging attachment and vacuuming up the quantities of sawdust created by the big roaring machine. Then, at evening, she finally goes home to spruce up. She takes an indulgently long hot shower, washes and dries her beautiful thick hair, anoints her skin with thrifty E45 cream and drives off to her mother’s house in freshly laundered clothes. She has with her a wholesome supper for two – a home-made cucumber soup; pork medallions on a bed of creamed spinach, along with some braised fennel; a salad of plums tossed lightly in a dressing of yogurt, mint and honey. Having rung the bell and knocked at the front-room window, Caroline finally lets herself in with her key. On a first round she doesn’t see the old woman, slumped unconscious and hypothermic, on the far side of the bed and she goes back downstairs. It is only a delayed mental image of the half-made bed that causes her to take a second look. Then it’s all stations go.