‘Do you know how to play the funeral game?’ she asked me one afternoon.
We were in my garden and she had just shot me with my own cap gun. Bug was a fierce cowboy. She could run faster than me, so I never stood much of a chance. I would hear the click of the toy gun and her victorious cry of ‘Bang! You're dead!’ before I even had time to dive behind the tree or garbage bin I had marked as my shelter.
I had never played funerals before. Our game of cowboys usually continued in circles until we were pink-cheeked and out of breath.
‘It's easy,’ she said. ‘If you're dead, then you're the body. So you lie on the ground and I get to bury you.’
‘Okay,’ I said, and lay on the soft grass as instructed. She was always the commander of our games—I was never more than a three-star general.
‘Keep your eyes closed. No talking. And put your hands like this,’ she said, crossing my arms so each hand rested upon the opposite shoulder. I shut my eyes.
‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ she said, her voice perfectly solemn. I felt a fistful of earth fall on my stomach. ‘May this good man rest in peace.’
Tentatively I opened one eye, hers were shut tight. She was clutching a bunch of hastily picked flowers, her small lips moving in a whisper I couldn't hear. The game was over when she had said her prayer, and I had been properly laid to rest, covered in dirt and flowers.
‘It's my turn to die now,’ she said. ‘Remember you have to pick the flowers first.’
But the era of Bug and me was short-lived. After all, as boy and girl we were destined to become enemies by the age of ten. Maybe it would have been different if her father hadn't remarried a woman so determined to make Bug into a ‘real little girl'. Like a mother bird she swooped down and snatched Bug out from right under my nose. She untangled Bug's hair, twisting the knots into braids of dark gold.
Bug was sent to a new school, with blazer jackets and stiff-collared shirts. It was far enough away that she had to be driven there and back, and she'd return home too late in the afternoon to play. My walks to school became solitary. I dawdled and scuffed my shoes, picked flowers for myself and made up new names for all the cats in our street so they could keep me company.
Over the next seven years we barely spoke a neighbourly hello. But still I always had an eye or an ear out for Bug. Habits from when we were younger persisted and I was attuned to the sound of her father's car doors slamming in the afternoons, the sound of her laugh. On hot days, when everyone left their doors open, I could hear music floating from her bedroom—always something old or strange, often the blues. And sometimes I would catch a glimpse of her from my bedroom window in the evening—on the phone, or on her way to meet some friend, maybe a boy. The way she looked on those nights—slender, long-haired and luminescent under a cool autumn moon—made me think she was probably popular.
It wasn't until the summer I was seventeen that we spoke again. It was December and exams were finally over. The days felt long and slow in a way they hadn't in years. Already Christmas was a tinselled plague upon the city. I planned to avoid the festivities at all costs, happy to hole up in my room listening to records, smoking out the window and trying to get started on my novel. I had bought myself a typewriter and decided that in the year between school and university, I would become the next Salinger. I thought that having a project would prove to my mother that I wasn't as idle as I seemed, and that my good grades and thirteen years of education hadn't been for nothing.
But it was too hot to be productive. I tossed and turned, drank too much black coffee and could never sleep. I lay awake at all hours, cloaked in warm air, willing the rain to come and break the spell. Sometimes the sky would darken during heavy afternoons and I would look out the window, hopeful. But it was never more than a lone cloud travelling across the sun. The air remained dry and promised nothing, every inch of it swollen with the mechanical purr of cicadas, which persisted like a chorus of wind-up toys singing their hearts out.
I took to walking the streets in the strange grey moments between the dead of night and dawn. I would slip out into the cool air, past the quiet houses sitting dark and stoic in the small hours. Even my blood felt restless. I told myself that it was the heat that kept me from sleeping, but I think now it was the insomnia of longing.
It was returning home one morning that I became hypnotised by the sight of a white taxi, slowing to a stop in front of Bug's house. The sky was moving slowly from grey to pink, the last of the stars were fading. When I caught a glimpse into the back window and saw her pale face, the idea that I could be dreaming drifted through my mind. I watched from my doorstep as she stepped out of the cab. She was wearing white. When she turned to close the door she saw me and waved. For that split second we were the only people on earth. Then she disappeared into her yard.
Bug and I began to talk again soon after that. Suddenly she was around every corner—not just in my memory, but standing before me, in flesh and blood, speaking my name and asking me colourless questions. It was always the same; both of us with idle time, free from school with nothing to do but fill the summer days. It didn't seem strange to find ourselves together in the afternoons, sitting on the cement curb in front of my house, talking.
It was on one of those afternoons that she told me she was leaving.
‘On Christmas morning,’ she said. ‘I fly out first thing. To NewYork.’
‘So soon!’ I exclaimed, for without realising it I had come to depend on our brief encounters to lend a point of difference to the summer days. ‘When do you come back?’
‘I'm not sure that I will,’ she said, and began to chew upon her lip. ‘I haven't really told anyone that. I just can't imagine thinking of this place and feeling homesick.’
In the days that followed I felt a similar anticipation to that I had as a child, counting down the days until Christmas. But now my anxious longing revolved around something that remained intangible, around peripheral dreams. Time was real once more. I could feel the grains of it passing me by.
Christmas Eve arrived and my family's simple traditions fell into place. I got the plastic tree down from the attic for my mother, and strung the lights with false enthusiasm. My father's family came for dinner. I was sullen and distracted. As the night wore on and everyone got drunk on Christmas pudding, I retreated upstairs to my room for a cigarette.
I opened the window and felt the warm air surge into my room as if it had been waiting all night, pressed against the glass. It was then, looking out at the Christmas lights twinkling around the rusted guttering of Bug's house, I saw her silhouette up on the roof, cut out against the dark blue horizon.
‘Hey!‘ I called to her, sticking my head out the window.
She turned around to face me, and stood up to wave in reply. Without another thought, I shut my window, went downstairs and crossed the road.
I opened the wooden gate and let it clatter behind me as I took the stone path down the side of her house.
‘I needed a break from the festivities,’ I said.
‘I don't blame you. Do you want to come up?' She peered at me over the edge of the roof, her long hair falling down around her face. ‘Just use the drain pipe to hoist yourself up. Rest a foot on my window sill, and I'll give you a hand from there.’
I did as she told me. I felt dizzy once I stood upright. Brandy swam around my head and it took me a minute to realise I was still holding on to her hand. Her fingernails were painted but bitten around the edges.
‘Nice view,’ I said, when had I found my footing. We could see the entire Sydney cityscape, little lights blinking yellow, outshining the stars.
‘I've spent a lot of time up here the last few years,’ she said, taking a seat upon the corrugated iron with her back resting against the brick chimney. I could barely make out her features in the darkness. ‘I'd imagine what people were doing in the city. I liked the idea of lots of people—like me, or not like me—just doing things, living out their little lives the best they c
an.’
A cool wind stirred the wisps of hair that fell around her collarbones. It rustled through the leaves and sounded like the ocean.
‘The problem with this country,’ I said, ‘is that if you walk just a bit, you find yourself staring into infinite sky.’
‘That's it,’ she said. ‘You stand under the stars and it makes you feel so…temporary.’
‘You know there is an actual term for the fear of constellations? They call it astrophobia,’ I said.
Bug was silent for a moment. She was looking past me, beyond the rows of red-roofed houses and towards the city, eyes glazed in a dream.
‘I'd rather look at neon lights,’ she said.
The wind picked up and her pale arms prickled with gooseflesh. She shivered. I noticed the water on her pale cheeks before I felt the rain, warm and wet, against my own skin. It fell in big, deliberate drops and bounced off the iron roof under our feet. When the thunder cracked down upon our heads, I could feel every wave of it in my chest. It felt like we stood in the very centre of the storm. In the distance, forks of lighting speared the night sky. With every flash, her face was briefly illuminated. In each silver flare I glimpsed the ghost of my childhood friend for just one moment.
‘We should probably get off the roof,’ I yelled, for I was never the brave one.
Wind sent rain lashing across our backs as we clambered down. By the time our feet hit the ground rain had soaked through my shirt and pasted it to my skin. I could feel every beat of my heart ringing through my body.
‘Well, happy Christmas,’ she said.
‘Goodbye,’ I said, and wished her luck. We didn't touch.
I walked home steadily. For a minute I was sure I would continue to hear her laughter in the wind on warm afternoons. She had left traces on every one of my memories—even the years we spent not speaking—for we had lived our lives in parallel since I could remember. But by the time I reached my front door, the feeling had passed. Already, she was gone, and with her she took the last of my childhood.
I went straight upstairs and collapsed face first on my bed. The heavy summer rain pounded against the roof, threw itself at my window and clattered against my brain. I thought only of the dripping December stars, and slept through until the morning, dreaming of nothing.
African jazz and so many bodies pump through the house. The grown-ups laugh or gossip or spill their smelly drinks. All my little cousins are asleep on the big bed in Aunty Didi and Uncle Mervin's room. I can't sleep tonight, so I sit on the steps between the dining room and the lounge and watch.
Most of the aunties are in the lounge. They're electric with loud talking. Fat Aunty Beaty has allowed her enormous backside to sink too deep into her armchair and now she's stuck. She twists. Her little hands grip the arms of her chair and her stumpy legs sway to and fro as she rocks to get herself unstuck. Aunty Didi and Aunty Wendy are on the bigger couch, eating their third serve of mutton curry with their hands, peppering each handful with their spicy stories. The uncles stand together in small clusters, talking about work and taking deep swigs from their glasses.
Some of Mummy's cousins are dancing in the space in the middle of the sofas and chairs.
My eyes fix hungrily on their movement. My head starts to bob to the beat, but I stop myself. There's something wrong with me, I'm ‘stiff’. I have the body of a little coloured girl, but the rhythm of a gangly white person. I don't know why I'm like this, everyone else dances like it's a memory they share. Why have I forgotten it? Last month I begged my friend Wanda to show me how to move like her. It's magic the way she writhes and shakes to the Zulu drums or American hip-hop. You can't help but stare at her tiny waist and her big thunder bum. I used to think she did it so that boys would look, but Africans like Wanda don't seem to care if anyone is watching. Coloured people always care what other people think, but Wanda moves just for herself. I want to dance like that, but all I can do is the jazz three-step.
I bite my nails and wish that Davie was here. Davie made these parties fun. We'd laugh and laugh at everyone. No-one's safe from Davie. He can put on their voices, their expressions, the way they move their hands when they talk. Nobody else knows why he's so good at it, but I know his secret—he's a watcher. I'm like that too, only he does something with what he sees; he makes it into something for himself. I see so many things, but I never know what to do with them. We don't laugh so much anymore, Davie and I. Mummy keeps saying, ‘He's a big man now.’
There's a commotion in the kitchen behind me and I lean back to peer through the doorway. Mummy's accidentally knocked over something big in there. She's on her knees using a solitary tea towel to try to stop the flow of dark curry, which spreads fast like blood from an unseen body. Someone is pulling her arm to get her off the floor and avoid messing her pretty white dress, but she's very focused on her task. The curry surrounds her knees, tears fall unbridled from her eyes. Her dress is ruined. If we were alone, I would go and put my hand on her hand, but everyone's watching. I turn back to the party.
I like my spot on the steps, but I wish there was a table to sit under that was closer to the action. I wish for this because I can see that I've been spotted. I see him coming and I cringe inside, wanting to be smaller and more invisible.
My step-grandfather, Charlie—stone-washed jeans cover his thin white legs and a garish button-down shirt that draws your eyes to his round belly, which is hard when you push it. His long hair, which hair-dye boxes would label ‘Jet Black', is tied back in a limp greasy ponytail. His eyebrows, which are thin from Grandma Brenda plucking out the grey hairs, are arched up like a question mark. Eight brass and gold rings, one on each finger, glint menacingly as he approaches me. Four rings go up to his mouth and pull out the cigar that is fixed there. Four rings reach for me as he leans down towards my face.
‘Come on, my dear. Come dance with your Charlie.’
My nostrils quiver a little, trying to reject the sour smell of his drinks and cigars. He is not my Charlie. I didn't ask for one, I really didn't want one.
We don't see these grandparents much. They live in Johannesburg, we live here in Pietermaritzburg. This is one of the few family parties a year when they appear. Their faces are swollen from decades of eating, drinking and inhaling so many good and bad things. They keep telling Mummy and me to visit them for a holiday. Charlie says we can swim in his pool and play on his tennis court, but we never go. I love them because that's what we're supposed to do, but I don't like them much.
Without waiting for an answer, Charlie grabs my arm and pulls me onto the dance floor. I think about wriggling my wrist out of his fat fingers and running away, but some of the others are watching.
Charlie asks, ‘Can you dance, my dear?’
My feet curl toward each other. I stare at them and pretend to be deaf.
‘Come on now.’
Four rings grip my hand; he bends low so that the other four can circle my waist. I take a deep breath and one, two, three. One, two, three.
‘Put your hips into it, girl! Swing them. More, more!’ Aunty Didi and Aunty Wendy instruct from the sidelines. They shout to be heard over the thumping music. More of the others start to watch as Charlie and I jazz around the dance floor. I try swinging my hips.
‘Swing it, girl.’
My cheeks burn. It feels like the world has paused to watch me do this awful thing. I want to stop, but instead I keep one, two, three-ing. I flick my hips out to the left and then to the right on every ‘three'. My eyes are glued to my feet: one, two, left; one, two, right. Slowly I begin to realise something. My feet are in time with the music. For the first time I feel it, I feel music. I'm not dancing next to the music like I am always teased about. I am inside the music and it is inside me. My hips begin to swing with more freedom. The aunties cheer and laugh. I'm really moving.
Charlie is laughing when we stop dancing, ‘Very good, my dear.’
‘I have to go.' I speak too softly and he doesn't hear.
‘I have
something special for you, did you know that?’
I shake my head, no.
‘It's in my car, let's go get it.’
‘I have to go to the toilet.' I say it loud this time. He lets go of me.
I sit on the toilet for a long time. It feels good to be free from Charlie's tight hands. When I finally come out, the hallway is almost empty. I can't see him anywhere. I creep into the kitchen, where Aunty Didi and Aunty Wendy tsk-tsk at the mess that Mummy's made. I duck down quickly behind the kitchen island.
‘What's wrong with our sister, Wendy?’
‘Tsk, man, she's always been dupsy like this.’
‘Her little one's the same.' Didi starts to laugh,
‘It's no wonder she dances like a daddy-long-legs dangling in the breeze.' Her laughter gets louder and harsher, until she is shrieking.
‘Ow, shame, man, don't laugh at the child like that, Didi.’
Didi takes a few big gulps of air to subdue her laughter. I imagine the swallowed laugh travelling down her body, and rippling the soft folds of her stomach. She chuckles more quietly.
Wendy says, ‘She's only a baby, she'll learn.’
Didi sucks air through the gap in her two front teeth. ‘Tsk, when Davie was only ten he could move like Michael Jackson. I'm telling you, you've either got it or you don't.’
‘Oh yes, that one could move. How's his new job going?’
‘Ya, lekka. He's a big man now with all this cash. He got me this brooch.' She must be gently touching the tiny golden fern she has pinned to one of her massive boobs.
‘It's nine-carat gold. I checked at the pawn shop.’
The Life You Choose and That Chose You Page 19