Slowly, laboriously, he chewed his mouthful of pounded, baked corn and disgusting health milk, swallowed, and asked her one simple question: “When will Mom be coming around the mountain, Cynthia?”
-
Virginia was greeted with high-pitched squealing as she walked through the door of her townhouse that evening—the kind of breathless, high-pitched singing that was usually accompanied by frantic bouncing and jumping on furniture. It was a sound she knew well, and as she rounded the hallway corner into her living room, she intercepted a flying schoolgirl, who swung awkwardly from her neck and screeched, “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she cooomes!”
Her middle child, Clark, shrugged his resignation at her from his seat in the corner, as an infomercial played out on the TV, completely drowned out by the ecstatic singing. Virginia smiled at them and hung up her keys. Seeing her kids after a long day was just the thing she needed. This was her home, and she loved it so very much. As she sank into the couch, breathing deeply, and closing her eyes, she made a note to talk to Gail, the superintendent, about the vagrants hanging around outside the front gates. On her way in, she could have sworn she’d seen some beanpole kid with dreadlocks flash a knife at her under his jacket.
–
History 1 evening classes were a guilty pleasure of Alex’s. He couldn’t exactly be called a diligent student, especially based on his attendance at most of his other classes. He fell victim to the same decadent temptations as his peers when it came to ditching a lesson. He was an average student, and lazy, there was no way around it. His reports had been stuffed since primary school with comments such as “Needs improvement” and “Is talented but does not apply himself”. He’d been convinced by the end of matric that they’d got a rubber stamp made for that last comment alone.
Even so, sitting in the back row of the Eden Grove Blue lecture hall after dark, Alex van der Haar felt calm, focused, and strangely vivified. Maybe it was the time of night, with its brisk evening breezes and twilight. Maybe it was that none of his friends or anyone he really knew that well took this class. He imagined Frank right into the room, more often than not, as if he were actually there, and though he’d never dream of responding to him out loud in public, this was a completely freeing slice of solitude. He shifted up on his chair, absentmindedly, leaving a small space on the seat next to him. This was his most treasured throwaway class, and he loved it.
He’d spent evenings caught in the flow, discourse and meaning, a simplification of the solid chunks of history, put out by Dr Albion de Villiers of the Rhodes history department. Idly stretching his arms out behind his desk and smiling inwardly, Alex couldn’t help but feel tickled at the sensation of being inside a stylised lecture—a part of some picture, indistinguishable from lecture halls in movies and posters and career day flyers around the world. He could, from where he was, imagine himself the back of a head in a picture on a website somewhere, indistinguishable from the sea of heads around him, faded into the background where he was unimportant, but always there.
As far as he could feel, this mayas well have been the only lecture hall in the world. The stylised one—the living experience of an idea.
He’d take down notes on the development of the Gutenberg press, wondering dreamily about the information he was being passed by this greying, stern-looking old man. Letting his mind wander, softly entertaining the idea that this could all be a gigantic lie. Was it a point of contention that what they were being taught was essentially fallible? Was that wrong to think? It was all facts. Figures, presented for consumption, all of which must’ve passed under the pens of thousands of historians, bureaus, governments communicating from across the world. Validating and corroborating and certifying and changing money, policies, hard copies and ideas about what went down.
And what if it was wrong? For whatever reason. Due to whatever bias. Even just some tiny part of it, misreported in the source material and untraceable. This was meant to be gospel, but, well, what if neither one was really worth anything? Would that even matter? What could it possibly change in his or anyone else’s life?
The South African government had spent most if not all of the apartheid years misrepresenting things such as art, news and music, with very specific agendas at hand. They’d censored the hell out of anything even remotely offensive. Things that well-meaning citizens took for granted as being handed to them, true, as is. The National Party had been shameless.
On his wall at home, Alex had a rare copy of Chris de Burgh’s altered Spanish Train LP single, released in South Africa. The title track had been deemed blasphemous by the South African censorship board around the time of its release because of its references to God and the Devil playing chess for souls. During a lengthy court battle with the distributors, which the government ultimately won, the album was reissued in SA as Lonely Sky and Other Stories—without the offending track, of course. Someone had at some point told him the print he had, in the condition he’d kept it, was pretty valuable, but he mostly just enjoyed the vintage look it gave his wall. No matter the context, it was, as it stood there, a beautiful piece of art.
De Villiers, who had made his way secretly over to the lectern, stood there now in his spotlight of tweed air, and spoke in that greying tone of his. “It’s not what they think it is—all of this. Your history, splayed out in front of you here, in pages and binders. They think they know what it is, this history of our world. Your friends and parents, the ones who can’t see the point to a course like this. Who think you should be doing something more ‘sensible’ with their tuition money—I’ve met them. I know the arguments, and they’re wrong. History, in all of its size and importance, seems neutered to the uninitiated—quaint or pointless to them; sentimental, like an art degree or something in the psychologies.
“They think it’s silly, to ‘waste one’s life chasing the ghosts of the past,’ yes? To believe that something tangible can come from the careful examination of things that happened many, many years before most of you had even been born. To dredge, with cold academia, the muddy rivers of our origins.
“I’m not going to stand here and pitch history to you. Truth be told—and I’ll only tell it once—I don’t give a shit what most of you think. I’ll wait while you write that down.” He waited. “What I do care about is what you learn. I’ll say this to you all once, as a personal favour from me to you—and if you’re of the right mind, I know it’ll stick...” He paused, seeming uncomfortable. “History is the wrinkled brow on a face that is yet to be born. If you know it, you’ve won a hard-earned victory in an otherwise dirty fight called life.”
He took a deep breath and looked, with pride, out into the faces of his students. “That was good, right?”
Another murmur trickled out from the class, and De Villiers smiled. “Good. With that said, I want you to write one thousand eight hundred words on ‘The Face of History’ for me by the end of the semester, as per your course outlines. This is your final paper of the year, constituting your hitherto unspecified forty percent term mark essay, so please, people, impress me. Enjoy the rest of your evening. Thank you.”
–
The stage lights were blinding from up behind the back-up micas. And hot. A chaotic and constant stream of rapidly switching green and purple flash bombs pulled sweat from the necks of the band members as they squinted out into the crowd. The Checkerboard Nightclub in Westbourne Road was where nineties music had gone after Y2K, and it had the post-apocalyptic stage lighting to prove it.
It made Clark look like some soft blur of corduroy and jeans shorts, his black electric guitar slung heavily around his neck. In the late-nineties music video of this cacophony of pinball sounds, smoke machines and spaghetti cabling, the camera would have opened on Clark, indistinct as he was, palm muting his way into the intro to “Cannonfire Sylvia”—a jarring mishmash of colour and ghostly presence.
Head hung low, wisps of dry ice fog creeping through the air around and behind him. Bringing the shot,
and the metaphor back, the widened frame would next include singer, Teddy Kreel, off to Clark’s right on acoustic rhythm guitar. Ted was a pole, skinny and tall and covered in weird joints that never looked like they were in the right place. He wore torn jeans and a massive Holiday Inn T-shirt, and from behind the mic he sneered for nothing other than the effect of it all. His and Clark’s relative guitar sounds created a ballsy harmony, building up slowly, and given added weight by the cheesy ambience floating in the visual din of the old room.
Rolling further back now to a full picture of the whole stage, the band crashing into the chorus, a rapid peak in the volume of their instruments. Razor scratches running up and down the sonics of the whole affair—a bulldozing crescendo. Ronnie and April James on bass and drums respectively, driving the wall of the track behind Ted’s lyrics, as his vocals scraped in.
“Roll that grenade into my first impression of you, kiss me all around my brain, but don’t you ever think you’ve sussed my last refrain.”
Four minutes later, like a bad first lay, it was all coming to an end. “Thank you for coming out, ladies and gentlemen! On his knees and to my left—just the way I like him—it’s Clark van der Haar on guitar!”
From his crouching position behind the backup mic, Clark stuck out his tongue at Teddy as he hammered rapidly on the last three chords, over and over. His pick cracked right down the middle, much the same as it always had.
The drums rolled to a stop, jacks were unplugged noisily, the last notes sounded out over the steadily creeping feedback that was such a common factor in every Checkerboard gig, and their set was done.
“Do you think there’s an hour in the day when these amps aren’t feeding back?” Ronnie asked, seconds later, leaning back from the microphone as six sets of individual and distinct claps drifted up from the meagre audience.
Clark smiled as he unstrapped his guitar and shoved it into its soft-cover case, haphazardly jamming cables and picks into the front pouch. “In Central? With these neighbours and their gulag noise restrictions? We’re lucky this place even exists.”
“You don’t know a whole lot about gulags, do you?”
“Shut up and pass me my pedal board, would you?”
Later, as he stepped out onto the wet pavement, Clark could smell the rain before he saw it. That’s how it was in PE. That harbour smell, faint and lingering like a ghost, barraged every sense with images of blankets and streaked windows and grandparents, who talked in warm, croaky tones.
He leaned against a wall and lit a cigarette. His mom had never figured out he smoked, even though Alex had been onto him from the first day.
“You’re seriously that guy now, Clark?” he’d said, tossing his box of LDs up playfully in the air one day, then hacky sacking it back into Clark’s hands. “You might think you look like Mike Wallace, bra...” He always emphasised the word “bra” when he was making a point, especially to Clark. “But you look like either Uncle Walt.”
He was right—this did look ridiculous, and on the few occasions when he’d seen him doing it, Alex looked ridiculous doing it too. But that kind of stuff never seemed to matter when it came to his older brother. He was eminently loveable—near impossible to dislike.
Clark smiled as he took a drag. His brother, the world’s most charming hypocrite.
The other Briefcase members came thudding down the wooden steps, careening and wheeling out onto the pavement, followed closely by two quiet randoms from the bar area who’d attached themselves to the ragged contingent at some point. Clark watched them push by a skinny man with dreadlocks who gave them a short nod before heading towards the doorway. He seemed to linger on the first step, and to Clark’s confusion, turned around at that exact moment, and stared off down the street in his direction.
He couldn’t see the man’s face in the shadow of the overhead lamp, but, with the way he lingered there, Clark could have sworn he was looking directly at him. A coldness draped itself over his shoulders like a wet towel, as his friends’ faces sprang to life in his foreground. His gaze was locked on the man on the stairs, who spat on the ground at the welcome mat, turned around and took the stairs, two at a time, grabbing onto the railing as he went.
And like that, the coldness lifted, and Clark was just any other guitarist, standing on the corner of Westbourne and Eastbourne Road, Central.
“Good job up there, you tone-deaf twat,” Teddy yelled out at Clark, a smile on his face.
“Thanks man, I couldn’t have done it without your R-three-two-five Sanchez acoustic and your Bee Gees vocals.”
Putting his arm over Clark’s shoulder, Ted led him off down the road, Ronnie and April trailing behind them on the wet paving, like dazed bumblebees in the night.
-
Alex was sitting in Crink’s basement with Ruth, sifting through a crate full of old LPs and waiting for their host to get back from class. They had Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album on the Technics system, because Ruth said it was “music you have to skip a lecture to”.
“Tell me again what the point of having a lockable front door is if scumbags like you know exactly where the spare key’s hidden?”
“I come over here every other Sunday and clean Crink’s place. The pay’s not great, but there’s semen stains on everything, which is awesome.”
Ruth rolled her eyes at this, which Alex always took as an okay from her to keep going. “No, seriously. I polish his shit, make his bed, and he lets me bring my posse around here to chuck craps after hours. It’s a pretty sweet deal.”
“You roll craps, Alex.”
“I know what I do, fool. You know, I wouldn’t talk like that to the leader of a craps gang, Ruthki. You might want to watch the sassypants.”
She nodded distractedly, flipping a copy of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland album over between her two flattened palms.
“He likes the smell of Mr Min on his bedside table while he spanks it to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”
“You’re a sick man.”
He smiled. “Only man you’ve ever managed to not shout down in a bar.”
“You’re referring, I take it, to the tall, blond and irritating B.Comm bomber from the bar the other night?”
“No, why? Is he on that pretty little mind of yours, sweetie?”
Ruthie looked up sullenly from behind her album cover. “Asshole. When’s your stupid friend getting home anyway?”
Alex could hear Omo, Crink’s Maltese, ricocheting up and down the thoroughfare outside under his window. He bumped a lit cigarette against the side of a flagon rim. All around them were the middle-class trappings of a teenage dream their friend had never grown out of—Michael Stipe in the days before he became a Billy Corgan haircut poster boy, staring down ruefully from a black-and-white REM poster; old household bric-a-brac lined shelves, covered with doilies.
“Crink’s...a strange cat. You’ve got to understand, he and I were tight in primary school.”
“God, you always speak in mid-nineties gangster lingo when you’re about to drop an overly sentimental account of ‘life growing up’ with you and that idiot. Should I put on the Touched by An Angel soundtrack now? He actually has that here somewhere.”
Alex ignored her, as Dylan slid into “Ballad of a Thin Man”.
“You know, there’s a reason Crink’s so weird.”
“Mmm?”
He put up his feet on the limited-edition, tin-moulded Farrah Fawcett side table in the corner and took a drag as Ruth receded into her corner of the couch.
“Just between us three,” he began, staring intently into Farrah’s Technicolor eyes, speaking slowly to his friend as she sank into his voice, “Crink’s been dead for years.”
Ruthie exhaled.
–
Little Charlie Robert Cranston died in the front seat of his mother’s car while she had her back turned. He was nine years old.
Loretta had pulled into the driveway of their three-bedroom home on a Sunday afternoon, her boys tossing
a Nerf ball in the back seat, bags of groceries thudding in the rear compartment. “All right, when we get inside, I want you guys to get dressed and ready for when Granma comes over this afternoon.”
“But, Granma always loses her glasses when she gets here, Ma. What difference is it what we wear?”
“Tom, I don’t have time for you to be a smart-ass today.”
Idling for a moment outside the garage door, Loretta had turned around, looked her scruffy boys over and had given the slightest of sighs. “You were so clean when we left here this morning. Where did you even find time to get this dirty?” She slammed the car door behind her, groceries and house keys in her hands in seconds, and started migrating the kids inside. Tom and Barry had been fighting lately, and she could see the hot summer sun getting them both good and agitated. She had turned to Crink and smiled. “Charlie, could you grab Mommy’s handbag and keys while I put these two hooligans in the bath quickly?”
Crink had beamed from the back seat, happy for the task passed down to him by his beleaguered mother. As the middle child, he escaped most accusations, because the young ones loved chaos, and the old ones hated conformity, and he was just there. He was at the perfect, most nondescript age for trouble making. It felt good to be given a task with some responsibility.
His mom had disappeared inside with his brothers, leaving Charlie Cranston alone to retrieve her handbag from the passenger seat, lock the car doors, and bring this symbol of his independence inside to her. The sun was belting down outside, and the leather interiors squeaked as Crink climbed over the backrests and into the front of the car. The vinyl dashboard had glared brilliantly white as he wrapped the pleather handle of her bag around his little hand, grabbed the keys, and moved to open the door.
Then he paused. Running his fingers along the material panelling, he brought his hand up to the electric window crank. It couldn’t work with the car off, surely. Tentatively pushing down on the indented end, the sudden sound of the electric motor winding down his window made him jump back and release the button, stopping the process instantly. After a moment’s hesitation, he had reached back to give it another, more determined pressing, winding the window about halfway down before bringing it to a rubbery halt.
Nails in the Sky Page 4