A flock of chittering Spanish chicas run for the shelter of a film theatre to lick Häagen-Dazs. Outside the theatre a sad, sallow beggar huddles in the rain, rocking on his heels like Birdy gone Vietnam-crazy. One of the girls drops her tub of Häagen-Dazs into his begging hands and the others giggle.
I take shelter in a callbox and read the advertisements for exotic Thai and blonde Swedish girls before picking up the mouthpiece. At the foot of Africa, at the foot of the Simonsberg, the albinofrog telephone calls its shrill croak through the house. Nana picks up the phone and wails when she hears it is me, as if my voice comes from the grave. Her wails set the dogs howling. I drop another fruitless coin into the slot before my mother comes to the phone. I tell her I am fine and am calling from Leicester Square. My mother’s crying mixes with the background howling and the clank clank of the telephone devouring coins.
– Don’t cry, Mom. I’m okay. You know I always dreamed of London.
I look through the rain-beaded glass at huddled shapes rushing by under hoods and black umbrellas. I run out of coins and my mother is cut short as she begins to tell me about the police having been there.
Afterwards, I walk down to Trafalgar Square in the rain and mope around in the lee of a stone lion. High above my head Nelson surveys the pigeon-riddled square while red buses skid around the rim. Outside South Africa House, rain-drenched protesters stand on the pavement like a straggling, forlorn flock of crows. The ink on some hand-painted banners bleeds, so that you can only just make out: Free Mandela.
From Trafalgar I wander down to Big Ben and stand on the bridge and look up and down the river as wide as the Orange, but tinted green instead of saffron. On the square in front of Big Ben I see Jan Smuts cast in bronze. In history at Paarl Boys’ High I was taught that he was a traitor to the Afrikaners for taking South Africa into the war against Hitler, on the side of the English who had burnt their farms and taken their women and children to the concentration camps.
As I walk along the Thames, I begin to feel the adventure of being alone in London. I have no past here. No one knows that I kissed Bulldog on the bus, or that I was a moffie deserter. One thing is for sure, I will never be called a rooinek in London.
To escape the biting cold I go into a building called The Tate where they advertise a free art film. The film has already run for a while and I do not understand it, but I gradually recover feeling in my fingers. For about a quarter of an hour the camera focuses on a round form. At first I think it is a sand dune, but then I see the bellybutton. It is a stomach full of unborn baby, a stomach as big as Jomo’s bongo drum. Now and then a mothwing shadow drifts over the stomach, but otherwise nothing happens that I am aware of.
A man in a uniform shakes me awake and says they are closing. I think it is the army and that the sarmajoor has tracked me down and I run a few steps, before it sinks in that I am in London.
I walk back down to the Chelsea bank, and along the cold, misty river to Charing Cross, where folk cab cosily to theatres.
I walk through the crushed fruit fallen from the daytime barrows of Berwick Street and go into a Soho pub. I order some beer and it is tapped into a deep glass by the young barman. Wild Thing thumps though the boxes.
I stand by the fire. Mist smokes off Peejay’s cords. Wild Thing is chased by a deep voice rapping pasties and a G-string, beer and a shot.
I sip the night away on the same flat pint of Carlsberg by the fire. Above the fireplace hang old sepia photographs of cricket teams.
One afternoon at the Groot Drakenstein Games Club, 6,000 miles south of Soho, my father said to me: Life is like a cricket ball. One side scuffed and grazed. One side rubbed smooth. When life is hard, remember that the ball swings around again.
The faces in the bar remain distant, as if I am watching another art film without any meaning I can discern.
I keep drifting back to the afternoon I rode the bus along the edge of the sea with Zelda: the tints of sunlight in her hair and the merry clink of the wine bottles.
On the beach Zelda’s stomach bowstrings taut under my fingers. As longing ripples through me, doves, not Cape turtledoves but white Picasso doves, flutter out of her sex into a blood-orange sky.
The bar empties after eleven. As I turn to go, the barman says:
– You South African?
– Yes. How’d you know?
– I picked up the accent when you ordered beer. Besides, I knew you weren’t English the moment you asked for a glass of beer instead of a pint of lager. I’m Delarey, he says as he shakes my hand over the bar.
– Incredible I should meet a South African on my first day in England.
Maybe I had not drifted all the way into the realm of random things after all.
– Hell, Delarey laughs, half the bloody barmen in London are South Africans or Ozzies. Listen, I have a room upstairs. It’s spartan but you can kip on the floor if you like.
I clearly give out the impression I have nowhere to go. I had thought of asking a taxidriver if he knew of a cheap hotel.
– Give me a hand with the glasses and we’ll go for a coffee, unless you’re too buggered after the flight and all.
– I’d love to go for a coffee.
– Good. Maybe I can lend you a pair of shoes? What size are you?
So we end up in a coffee shop in Soho where they brew Italian espresso and you can look through the breath-misted windows at a pink neon sign on the other side of Dean Street that flashes: GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS. Under the neon sign a woman perches on a barstool in a doorway and gestures to the men who walk by. Men with wives or girlfriends steal glances at her zipped miniskirt, others let their eyes drink in her stockinged legs.
After the coffee, Delarey and I queue outside a café called Freestyle until some whim tickles the bouncer to let us past his bulk. Inside we get bottled Budweiser at the bar. It costs five pounds. You can get a whole crate of beer for five pounds in South Africa. Not Budweiser or Carlsberg, because of the boycotts, but good beer.
– Hard to find a beer after the pubs shut, so you fork out the pounds, Delarey says.
The lights flicker colours across faces and I see two boys kissing deeply. When the music dims between songs I can hear the sucking. One of the boys playfully blows a kiss at me when he catches me gawking. Delarey laughs when my cheeks go red.
I hold the cold beer to cool my face as Delarey tells me of his plans to save pounds in London then head for Paris and Rome and Paros.
I stay with Delarey above the Soho pub. In the evenings I sit on a barstool and read Kerouac’s surreal travels across America. When I surface from my book I find Delarey has tapped another free pint of beer for me. During the day I look for jobs in cafés and bars and bookshops in Camden and Notting Hill Gate and South Kensington, but I am turned away time and time again because I have no work visa. I begin to feel worthless and that I will end up begging in Leicester Square like the Birdy man.
I sip slow coffees at Café LaVille, on a bridge over a canal, looking down on the vividly painted boats that float out from under me, reminding me of fishing boats in Kalk Bay. But in London there are no barefoot coloured boys dangling handlines into the water. I see lone fishermen fish from the bank of the barge-path to Camden, but I never see anyone catch a fish. I peer into a bucket, hoping to see a fish or two. Instead the bucket is full of maggots. The fisherman dips his hands into the maggots and scatters them over the water for the fish, just like a farmer flinging seeds over the earth.
Afternoons: I explore the kaleidoscope of Camden Lock with all its ceramics and sarongs and exotic carpets and bolts of Indian cloth. I stand dazed on street corners before choosing a road for no other reason than I have never walked it before. Making a pound last the whole afternoon by wandering aimlessly for hours before going into Freud’s for another bitter black coffee. I watch films for one pound twenty at a cinema behind Leicester Square, where it merges into China Town. Sometimes I hide in the toilets and come out when the next film begins.
In
spite of free beer and cheap films I am skint after a fortnight. Delarey, sounding just like Peejay, tunes:
– Just be cool, something will pitch.
But I am not so sure. The cricket ball is swinging slowly. I am down to my last twenty pounds and sick of the cheddar and pickle sandwiches Delarey smuggles upstairs for me, when I pick up one of the free magazines you find on street corners in London. Listlessly flipping through it, an advert catches my eye:
Chambermaid wanted in quaint harbourside country hotel, Lynmouth, North Devon. Room provided.
I call up the hotel from a callbox in Gloucester Road.
– Hello, I’m calling from London about the chambermaid job. I was wondering if it was still free.
– Actually, says a voice sounding all Olivier, we had a girl in mind.
– I understand, I say, my heart plunging. It’s just that I thought you might give me a chance. I was in the army so I can make a bed and scrub toilets and iron and that kind of thing. You see, I need the job.
– Are you Australian? the hotelkeeper wonders.
– South African. My folks live on a wine farm near Cape Town.
– Which farm? I may know it as I’ve visited South Africa a few times. Good trout fishing you know.
– Boschendal, I tell him.
– Boschendal? I lunched there under the pines. Say, do you play tennis?
– I do.
– Do you have a racquet with you?
– I never go anywhere without my tennis racquet.
– Well then, you hop on the evening train to Exeter and I’ll have our chef, Jimi, come down to fetch you. We’ll play tennis and I daresay we’ll think of something for you to do.
My mother’s brother once took me fly fishing as a small boy. I tangled the line again and again and almost hooked a cow before I felt a fish tug. I reeled it in and saw a black-spotted shimmer of fish for a fraction of time, before it broke the line. It haunts me to think of a fish somewhere under the black waters with my steel hook in its gills. Like a shameful memory deep down among the mudooze reeds. Like a dog down a well shaft.
I catch the Exeter train from Waterloo with a Camden rucksack woven in Kathmandu, and a wooden racquet from Oxfam so old Fred Perry might have played with it. Delarey is there at Waterloo to lend me the money I am short of for the ticket and to wave goodbye.
On the way to Exeter I see the England I had imagined before arriving in London. Black-and-white cows like graphic art against a green so green it is hard for the eye to absorb. I see Salisbury cathedral lance into a sky as milky as a blind eye.
At the Dorset station of Templecombe the train halts for a long time. Word from the front is that we have killed a cow and they are dragging it off the tracks. I wonder what drove a cow surrounded by vast green fields to graze on the railway line. The dead cow on the tracks reminds me of when the school bus was on a roundabout in Paarl and a policeman on a bike came by on the inside. The tyres skidded and the policeman’s head went under the bus. The bus jammed to a halt and the kids who had seen the slide yelled. The coloured bus driver climbed out and walked down the side of the bus, then fell down flat in the road. The policeman lay under the bus but you could see the blood flow slow as candlewax towards the gutter. We sat in the canned heat until they covered the blood with sand and a policeman drove the bus on through Paarl to drop us off on the farms.
We reach Exeter as black ink seeps into the sky.
Jimi is there, smoking a cigarette against an MG convertible. You can tell he wants me to think he is cool with his fag and wheels. On the winding road up to Lynmouth, through Barnstaple, Jimi tunes:
– You into pool at all?
– No.
I have only played carom, Indian finger pool, on the veranda with Zane.
– I’ll teach you to shoot some pool. At night, after the chaos of the kitchen, we head up to a pub where there’s pool and good bitter. Though you South Africans drink cold lager like the Ozzies, yeah?
I confess to loving beer ice-cold.
– There’s a barman there who fancies himself as a philosopher. Don’t be fazed if he corners you. He comes on to all the new boys in town.
I play tennis with the hotelkeeper on the edge of the sea. A gust blows across the channel and you can just make out Wales with its factory chimneys on the far side. My Oxfam racquet twangs like an untuned guitar. The wind and my instinct to cut the ball send it drifting out of his reach all the time. He is as flummoxed by my unorthodox curving of the ball as the English soldiers in the Boer War were by the Boer tactics of hiding and shooting from undercover.
– I am used to a tradition of tennis, he says after the game, where the ball has good length and one has a fair chance of returning it.
I think I have dashed my chances of a job and will be hitching back to Delarey for cheese and pickle sandwiches like a begging dog.
But he’s forgiving.
– If you can scour pots like you can spin a ball, there’s a job as kitchen porter for you.
So I become a kitchen boy in Devon in a thatch timber-framed hotel that existed as a hotel long before Jan van Riebeeck sailed from Holland to the Cape. I scour pots and pans in a cramped room under a fly-specked bulb, a dim reminder of the sun. I swab the floor. I steelwool the stove. I endlessly peel potatoes, for the English love their chips. I hose down the hotelkeeper’s Labrador after it has rolled in cow dung. I behead and gut trout that slither out of my hands so that I cut my fingers instead. I barter crayfish from the fishing boats and haul them to the hotel in a basket, like the wicker baskets the coloureds in the Cape fill with picked fruit.
The crayfish (which the English call lobsters) always try to climb out of the basket, as if they sense their macabre fate. One crayfish pincers my finger to the bone before I can fling it against the harbour wall. The shell cracks open like the crab the coloured boy stoned against the tar.
I have to tip the basket of crayfish into a pot of scalding water. My blood shivers with the guilt as their shells change colour from black to red. Not postbox red. Not cockscomb red. But pink red like eggs stained at Easter with a drop of the blood of Jesus.
With a butcher knife I cleave the crayfish down the middle and prize out their white flesh. Sometimes the shells explode as I knife down and I end up with bits of crayfish in my hair and everywhere. And if the bell rings I drop the crayfish and run to the front desk, my hair specked with crayfish and my apron flecked with trout blood.
Old ladies pay me 50 pence to cart their suitcases up the rickety, winding stairs to some far corner of the hotel. Had they glimpsed the blood and carnage in my viewless room behind the kitchen, where trout and crayfish heads eye me from a barrel, they might not find Devon so quaint.
Still, I escape the crayfish and the old ladies on my long afternoon runs along the coastal path that winds past an abbey and down to the cove of Woody Bay. During the war a German plane came down on a hill above Woody Bay. Farmers armed with pitchforks captured the pilot. Like him, I have landed in a land of foreigners who spend long hours staring soulfully into their bitter and who play pool and darts and say cryptic things, like tor for hill and combe for valley.
At night Jimi helps me swab the floors so we can leave the hotel together and race uphill in his MG to the pub that spans the river. The gay barman there pours a cold Stella for me as soon as I come in, and I sit at the bar and shoot the breeze. I call him Camus. My Stella never runs dry as long as I have an ear for his philosophy.
Some afternoons I run along the high road across the moor to Porlock. It was on this road that Coleridge found Xanadu, where Alph, the sacred river, ran down to a sunless sea. A savage place under a waning moon, haunted by a woman wailing for her demon-lover. But that stranger tapping at the door popped the dream and Coleridge never could find the way back.
Whenever I run along the Porlock Road I recall my Xanadu at the foot of Africa: Groot Drakenstein, dragon mountain, and the Berg River flowing through the vineyard valley down to the cold Atlantic.
And I wonder if I will ever see the savage and enchanted valley bathed in blood orange again, or if I will live forever in exile beyond Xanadu.
And at night Tangled Up in Blue unreels time and time again in the pub over the river. Bougainvillaea tangled up in morning glory. A mind entangled in the past.
Camus believes the present contains the past.
– You will find all the conflicts and passions of history in this town at this time, on a reduced scale and in a diluted form, he murmurs, burrowing his fingers into his beard.
It is absurd to me that all of history should be reduced to the small town of Lynton, North Devon, but it is original as a philosophy. My only philosophy is my father’s homespun wisdom that life is like a cricket ball. Two hemispheres. Smooth female yin and grazed male yang.
Pool: Jimi tells me to relax my fingers and glide the cue, not jab at the white ball. But still the balls ricochet in random directions.
There is a girl Jimi fancies, Marina, half-Venezuelan, half-French. She works in the rival hotel on the rocks across the harbour. Jimi bends over her to ensure she has a good stance for pool, while the old men at the bar wink knowingly at each other.
One of the old men is a sheep farmer with leathery skin and beer foam lingering on his moustache and his sheepdog at his feet. As if a lost Zulu sangoma roving the black moors of Devon has cast a spell on him, he turns into a poet in the pub and lovingly describes those balls of bone and skin that owls gob up.
– You rub the ball between your fingers until it crumbs in your hands and there you have a life story in your palm.
After the pub shuts, I lie in my bed over the harbour and listen to the tide roll the stones on the shore and to the clink of rigging against masts. I think of the valley and of Zelda and sometimes the two mingle like bloodbrother blood.
Dam water beading on her skin, she holds me after Maljan shamed me in the PT changing rooms.
Blood Orange Page 14