by Rosie Rowell
Spook is behind me. I’m stupidly holding the book in one hand and the jeans in my other. He leans over me and takes the ID book from my hand. His stubbly cheek is inches away from mine. ‘My old lady.’ he says, his voice gruff. He opens it and a trickle of sand falls to the floor. I lean over and look at the picture. The black and white photo of a woman is faded to the point that any similarities to Spook are blurred. Her name is Cornelia Roux.
I feel shocked by this unexpected vulnerability – it belongs to a child, not a fully grown man. Instead of saying anything I hold out the pair of jeans.
‘She left it behind the day she walked out.’ He’s still looking at the picture. ‘For the longest time I thought she’d come back for it. I thought she’d left it behind on purpose.’
‘Don’t you have any other pictures of her?’ I say. My embarrassment makes the question sound rude. Having sex with someone does not oblige him to confide in you, especially when he is nearly twice your age and should be married and settled down.
‘Of course.’ He laughs as though I’m the weird one. But when I look at him, his eyes are tender and I want to reach out and stroke his cheek and suddenly he’s looking at me and I know he can read my thoughts. He teases out the moment; then leans forward and plants the gentlest kiss on my lips, and leaves the room.
Two hundred sit-ups later I feel calmer. As I’m having a shower to get rid of my red face, I decide that maybe the tension between Spook and Louisa is a good thing. He needs to go. Everything about him, from the way he has just appeared without warning, to the way that whenever he is around it is as though every cell in my body is on high alert, makes me feel out of control.
On my way outside I grab two carrots from the fridge. Music floats through the house. Outside, Spook is bent over the braai. He makes a comment to Louisa, which makes Brett laugh. I hesitate in the sitting room, trying to catch up with the change in mood. This isn’t supposed to be happening – Spook should be on the verge of leaving, not cooking lunch.
Louisa is sitting at the table, bent over an open newspaper. She looks up. ‘Listen to this, this is unbelievable: “Abalone poaching syndicate harvest abalone worth more than R2 billion and pocket more than R50 million.”’
Brett groans. ‘She’s off again.’
Poaching is one of those topics I have a ‘headline’ knowledge of. I know it’s to do with the government and unemployment in the local communities, which means that fishermen resort to illegal poaching … which in turn has had an environmental impact on the coastline. And of course I know that gangs make money out of poaching, but that’s about it. I try not to get involved in Louisa’s heated debates as she always knows more than me and I end up feeling foolish. It was the same a few months ago when my mum and my aunt Julia had a loud argument about poachers.
Louisa’s still reading aloud, she hasn’t noticed me in the doorway. ‘It says here that this particular syndicate has been operating since at least 1986 but have been very hard to catch. That’s twenty-seven years! The whole thing is like a multi-national business, employing spotters, packers, drivers, collectors of money, divers and poachers, obviously.’
‘Not to mention the police,’ says Brett.
‘Exactly. What kind of a police force takes twenty-seven years to crack down on a syndicate? Your precious “Mother Ocean” is just another rape victim in this country, Brett.’
Spook chokes on his mouthful of beer.
‘Welcome to life with Louisa,’ says Brett to Spook. ‘It’s never dull.’
It was over Sunday lunch; Julia’s weekly meal with us and the most argumentative three hours of the week. Ju-Ju claimed poaching was another legacy of apartheid and the continuing staggering unemployment. Her argument was that if the Minister of Fisheries would open up the coastline and curb the power of the huge fishing companies, local fishermen could make a decent living from the sea and we wouldn’t have a poaching problem.
‘Bullshit, Julia,’ Mum said. ‘It’s a lucrative, highly organised criminal operation. And the ringleaders don’t give a shit. They plunder the coastline to make themselves rich. They’re pushing tik1 in the playgrounds and spreading cold-blooded terror.’ As with most of their conversations, it wasn’t the poachers they were arguing about. It was the type of argument that ended with one of them saying: ‘I can’t help it if that’s the way you choose to see the world.’
‘What I don’t understand is the connection between tik and abalone,’ I comment, a question I didn’t have the energy to ask my mum as it would simply have drawn out the argument with Ju-Ju.
‘Where have you been?’ Louisa glances up.
‘Having a shower,’ I mumble.
She raises an eyebrow as she takes a sip of beer. ‘The gangs trade the abalone, mainly to the Far East, in exchange for the chemicals used to produce tik. So they control the abalone and the local drug trade.’
‘Jeez, tik is scary shit. My mum has a friend whose cousin was sitting down to supper with her family one Saturday night and two guys jumped over their wall. When the husband tried to defend his family against the guys, they shot him in the eye.’
‘Brett, that’s horrible!’ I scrunch up my face.
‘It’s true. They shot him in front of his kids. They were off their faces on tik.’
‘So how would you fix the poaching problem, madame President?’ I ask Louisa.
‘Incentivise the communities to stand up to the gangs,’ replies Louisa without hesitation. How does she manage to have an answer to everything?
‘How?’ I reply.
Louisa flashes me her million-dollar smile, which is a sure sign she’s winging it. ‘Chocolates. Tex bars. No one can resist a Tex bar, right?’
I pull a face at her and turn to Spook. He has been silent all this time. ‘What do you think about poaching?’
Spook looks out towards the ocean then back at me. ‘I think I should get some more beers,’ he says and gathers the empty bottles on the table.
‘Spook has been telling us about his surfing trips to “Indo”.’ Louisa air-quotes with heavy sarcasm.
‘It sounds flipping awesome,’ says Brett. He’s leaning against the railing. He turns and looks out over the ocean. ‘So many flipping awesome places to go.’ His voice is charged with an urgency that makes Louisa look up.
I glance after Spook, despite myself. Even after two hundred sit-ups I can still feel his kiss.
Louisa’s phone rings. She picks it up. ‘It’s Helen,’ she says – in a tone that could easily be taken as relief – and disappears inside.
The afternoon sun has passed overhead and is now slipping heavily towards the horizon. The remains of our lunch are spread out on the table. The fat from the lamb chops in the pan has congealed into mini oil slicks. The potatoes in the salad have grown a crust. As the empty beer bottles have piled up, so a tension between Spook and Louisa has crept back into the conversation.
‘I’m not saying a gap year is a bad thing, of course Brett should go and have a good time, but university is important,’ Louisa says to Spook.
‘What if you don’t want to go to university?’ Spook asks mildly.
‘Everyone wants to go to university,’ Louisa snaps.
Brett hasn’t said anything for a while. Now he stands up a little unsteadily and turns towards the sea. ‘Oh look, it’s about time for sundowners,’ he says.
‘What are you set to study?’ Spook continues with Louisa, undaunted by her tone.
‘Social work,’ she says, with a little look at Brett and me.
‘Wow!’ says Spook.
‘Wow what?’
‘I would have put you down as a lawyer. You don’t strike me as a person who oozes with compassion.’
‘I ooze when the situation calls for it,’ replies Louisa.
Spook laughs. ‘What about you?’ He turns to me. The question catches me off guard. Leftover food crowds my vision. It is messy and unhygienic. I turn away from it and try to focus on Spook’s question. My mum was trainin
g to be an opera singer at the UCT music school when she got pregnant with me. She swapped that for an accountancy job.
‘Nothing interesting enough to talk about,’ I say eventually and start gathering up the bowls and paper plates. I can feel Louisa’s look of surprise. Her eyes follow me inside.
A few months ago I opened Rory’s door to see Mum sitting in my chair. She turned around with her ‘Now don’t make a fuss’ expression.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. I’d mentioned Rory once by accident at home. Had she been talking to him behind my back?
She let out an embarrassed laugh.
Rory cleared his throat. ‘I invited your mum here today so that we could talk about next year.’
‘What about it?’ I turned to him. He had changed his ‘coach’ outfit for a short-sleeved checked shirt and chinos. It looked wrong.
He shifted a neat pile of books two centimetres to the left. ‘There is an outpatients’ programme I think you’d benefit from attending. It’s a place where you can work through some things. Get to know yourself.’
‘I can’t think of anything worse,’ I said, as a joke, but he nodded and wrote something down. I turned back to Mum. She took out a pamphlet.
‘I don’t need a programme. Anyway, I’m going to be at university, remember?’
‘Slow down, Grace, it’s not what you think,’ she said quietly.
‘It’s a place for all sorts of teenagers, from different backgrounds, dealing with lots of different issues,’ added Rory, as if they had rehearsed it.
‘No!’ I said, getting up. ‘I won’t go. You can both fuck off.’
Spook follows me inside. I am acutely aware of his body behind me in the small kitchen. But the memory of Mum and Rory has left me feeling cross.
Spook whistles. ‘I’d forgotten how much everything matters when you’re eighteen.’
I feel young and silly. But ‘young and silly’ is the whole point of this week!
‘It’ll pass,’ he continues. ‘Everything passes in time.’
That comment is too close to Rory’s grown-up smugness. ‘Spook, how old are you?’
He looks at me, his head to the side. ‘How old do you think?’
I turn and gaze out the kitchen window, wishing I hadn’t asked the question, not wanting to know the answer. ‘I dunno, thirty maybe?’ I look back at him.
‘Thirty-five.’
In too many ways I do not feel ‘fine’. ‘So why are you here?’
‘Collecting my tobacco pouch.’ He holds it up and disappears outside. I take my time clearing up the kitchen. Throwing away food without touching it is very empowering. He’s old enough to be your father. ‘Shut up!’ I say loud to the Mum-sounding voice in my head. Leave me alone.
When I get back to the table Spook is rolling a joint. Obviously we’ve all smoked weed, but the way Spook smokes is different. He treats it like an old man preparing his after-dinner tobacco pipe. He takes two deep drags and passes it to Louisa. ‘For our future president,’ he says and bows.
Louisa catches my eye with a smile. ‘See, it’s confirmed,’ I say.
‘You guys don’t strike me as West Coast people,’ Spook says in the evening gloom. There is a rhythmic thud of music in the distance as Saturday night parties begin to warm up. Someone on our road is braaiing.
Louisa has just inhaled and starts laughing. ‘No,’ she says. ‘We wanted to go to Plett or Hermanus. Then my mother got involved. This is her idea of a compromise.’
Spook raises an eyebrow.
‘Funny, right? I can almost hear my mum laughing. We couldn’t get into trouble here even if we paid for it. Why are you here?’ asks Louisa as she hands me the joint. I get up without taking a drag and pass it to Brett.
‘This particular stretch of ocean is my playground,’ he says. ‘There is a break that I would happily spend the rest of my life surfing. I am its devotee.’
Brett snorts on the joint. ‘Dude, come on.’
Spook relights the joint and takes another drag. ‘I guess that sounds stupid when you’re eighteen. But surfing isn’t a sport for me. The ocean is my therapist and my guru all rolled into one.’
‘Funny,’ says Brett.
‘Hey?’
‘Rolled, as in rolling waves. I thought you were making a joke.’
Spook looks at him. ‘No. For kids these days it’s all about tricks and moves on the board and belonging to the cool club. A few years ago I brought a longboard up here. The first time you get the hang of it, it’s like you’re suddenly surfing alongside the spirits of August and Hynson.’
‘Oh please, you’re as much part of a club as kids these days,’ Louisa says, air-quoting Spook.
‘Where is the club? Mine is a soul journey, a commitment to the water that transcends everything else.’
Spook’s words make me cringe; I wish he hadn’t said them. They sound clunky in the soft light.
‘That doesn’t sound transcendent; that sounds emotionally retarded!’ replies Louisa. I smile. I’d forgotten how aggro dope makes her.
Spook laughs. ‘Every day you go out on your board, you face yourself. Most people spend their lives running from that experience.’
‘If I get anywhere close to the soul shit, you have my full permission to exterminate me,’ says Brett to Louisa.
Spook laughs. He fiddles with the pack of Rizlas. ‘We all start out looking for a good time, to screw birds, to live the dream. But at some point you realise that that’s not enough.’
I blush, despite myself. I feel Louisa looking at me. She knows me too well. ‘Must be tough on the person who falls in love with you,’ she comments.
I glare at her.
‘Why?’ Spook laughs.
‘It’s such a selfish existence.’
‘I’m no more selfish than all my mates who’ve bought a home and have a wifey and kids and spend Saturday afternoons watching rugby with their buddies. That’s cool, man, I’m not judging. But we’re all selfish.’ For a moment he wanders off into a stoned thought, then suddenly he’s back. ‘“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.”’
‘Did you just make that up?’ asks Brett.
Spook laughs. ‘It’s fucking Rousseau, man. Society wants you to follow the norm like little sheep because if you don’t, all the other little sheepies feel insecure.’ Spook rubs the back of his head. ‘Well, fuck them.’
Louisa laughs. ‘That’s all very well when you’re young, but you’ll end up a sad, lonely old man with skin cancer.’
‘No he won’t, he’ll be a legend,’ says Brett.
Louisa sends Brett a sharp look.
‘I’m not sure I even want to reach old man status.’
‘How very rock and roll,’ snaps Louisa.
Spook laughs. ‘They call it a rat race for a reason. All you have to do is step away and you’re free.’
‘To live in a car,’ says Louisa.
I envy Louisa. She wants that life of happy families and a house with a pool. She doesn’t realise it, but she has a sense of entitlement, a birthright into that world. Brett is part of that world too, even though he’s enjoying rebelling against it at the moment. I’ve never felt that. I’m not sure I want it. The problem is I don’t know what else to do, how else to be. I don’t want to be my mother, always on the edges of that world, even though she chose to defy it. Spook seems to have made up his own world.
Louisa stands in front of Brett and cups his face. ‘Come down to the beach with me.’
‘Why?’
‘Come,’ says Louisa, in that growly tigress voice she gets from nowhere.
Louisa and Brett disappearing into the evening leaves Spook and me alone. Did she do this on purpose? My hands feel clammy. The kiss earlier, so light and perfect, now feels laden with expectation. If this were a film, I’d glance up to find Spook looking at me. He’d tuck his hair behind his ear. I would smile and there would be a cute moment when we realise we’re reading each other’s thoughts. Then the loo
k would grow into something more. Of course that doesn’t happen – after all, if it were a film that would make me the main character and there’d never be a film about me.
Desperate to break the silence, I blurt out: ‘Do you really believe all that stuff?’
Spook looks surprised. ‘Sure.’
‘It sounds so surfy.’
‘I don’t care what it sounds like.’ He stretches lazily then sits up with a decisive sniff. ‘I’m going to head to the hotel for a drink. Do you want to come along?’
What? We’re supposed to be having sex! At the very least he’s supposed to want to. ‘Nah,’ I manage to reply in the end.
He looks at me. ‘You remind me of someone I once knew.’
I raise an eyebrow.
‘A little minx of a girl.’
‘Doesn’t sound like me.’
He laughs.
‘What happened to her?’
‘Dunno. She got married, had kids. What happens to everyone?’
‘She could have died. It would be more of a story.’
Spook frowns at me then bursts out laughing. ‘I like you,’ he says. He gets up and steps into his boots. ‘Take it easy.’
Spook has taken the last of the evening sun and left me in the gloom. Why did he say ‘take it easy’? Am I coming across as stressed? I thought I was doing well considering the afternoon of out-staring uneaten food. Still, I must be the only eighteen-year-old in the world who would choose to sit outside on a deck alone on a Saturday night instead of going out and having a good time.