So many hands have rubbed her breasts that the bronze gleams like a piano pedal treaded over a lifetime.
– Her original head was sawn off by vandals, Lars tells me. It may be somewhere in the harbour.
Back in Nyhavn, Lars and I sit with our feet dangling over the wall like the Kalk Bay handline boys, drinking Carlsberg. I am excited to be in a place I dreamed of, but wish I hadn’t seen the mermaid surrounded by tourists and that she still existed untouched in my imagination.
We dredge up stories of the farm and the dam and kebabed pigeons and Steely Dan. I tell him about how I found Zelda reading Out of Africa in the Blue Note Café, and how I fell head over heels for her. I tell him about the sarmajoor and the light bulb, about Peejay and the Jay Bay surfers. Lars smiles when I tell him about my kitchenboy flirts with crayfish and old ladies in Devon. It feels good to make him laugh and I want to hold his hand or something because he is so physical a reminder of the valley I pine for.
– You should become a storyteller, he laughs.
Lars knows I am dying to see Zelda and he shows me the way to the Yellow Submarine, past the round tower and up near the north station. Outside the bar, he tunes:
– Leave some of the Danish girls for me. I’ll see you when I see you.
He takes my rucksack for me and gives me a key to his flat. Then he winks at me and walks away as coolly as if we still see each other most days just by crossing the road. Swinging on the gate under a blood-orange sunset. Nero and Fango barking at the squirrels in the stone pines. Tractors rattling by, the trailer bins filled with fruitpickers catching a lift home after a long day in the sun.
I go into the bar full of young folk drinking and chatting and peering through the smoke at backgammon boards and newspapers. Hey Jude on the jukebox.
I sit on a free barstool at the bar and look for Zelda as Hey Jude fades into Strawberry Fields.
Zelda is not there. Instead there is a waitress with black hair and black fingernails and skin so white her fingers look like piano keys, and a predatory panther look. She homes in on me to ask what I want. I want Zelda but I just order a beer.
Big Yellow Taxi comes over the jukebox. Not just the Beatles then. I fleetingly recall Che and Matanga and the Jamaica girls but my heart beats too fast for reverie. Zelda might happen at any time.
The panther comes back with my Carlsberg.
An Indian flowerseller with a white beard goes from table to table, but is ignored. Then he stands in front of me with his forlorn eyes staring into me as if he can see my naked feelings for Zelda, and pities me.
I feel as if all eyes are focused on me, like the old days on the school bus, and I buy one of his roses. He wants 20 kroner, the price of a beer, for just one rose. I dare not quibble, for how am I to know what a rose costs in Copenhagen?
Just then I see another waitress with a tray of beers balanced on one hand. She swings her hips as she weaves through the tables towards the rowdy far corner. They are strong blokes, like the boys in the back seat of the school bus. They peer down her T-shirt as she leans over the table. They joke with her and I see her teeth laugh and only then do I recognise her, for she has dyed her hair red.
And then she sees me and comes to kiss me on both cheeks. For a blurred instant I smell her hair and I want to bury my face in it. I want to feel her breasts squash against my ribs and hold her against me until the bar melts away and leaves us on the edge of the sea again.
But she draws away and says:
– You chose a good time to come. There’s a party tonight, so you’ll meet my friends. We’ll have a good time and catch up on everything. Oh is that for me? How sweet.
And as she leans over the bar to fill an empty Carlsberg bottle with water from a tap, her skirt comes up high. She drops the rose in the bottle.
– Now don’t you dare run away like you did from the army.
And when I most want her to belong to my imagination and to one sublime day in Cape Town, she belongs to the fan-eddied smoke that dims the bar, to the undertones of lust in the jaunty jazz chords, to the leering men. Did I imagine her nipples in my mouth, the nodes of her spine under my fingers?
She swings back to serving tables while I watch from my barstool with the rose in the beer bottle. The men give me dirty looks. But whenever she smiles at me, however fleetingly, she chases the doubts away. Her smile says: You see, the sea is full of fish but you’re still my beach boy.
catch-22
WE GET A LIFT to the party with a girl called Sanne (forgetting the red rose on the bar) and the girls chat in Danish in the front. The language is full of vowels strung together and I wish I had learned some Danish from Lars. All I know in Danish is how to order a beer, and I’d been too scared to try it out on the panther girl. And I know how to say I love you. But the chance of uttering those words is fading fast.
At the party I am introduced to Jens and Lars and Bo and other tall blond vikings who cluster at the kitchen window to smoke grass. It is hard to keep Zelda in sight for she flits flirtatiously and elusively from cluster to cluster. My heart reels out after her as she kites away on the gust of a whim.
Once she comes back to draw me towards another cluster of Danes outside the toilet door, gathered there because the beer is chilled in the bath. I don’t catch the names but I think they are also called Jens and Lars and Bo. They want to know my feelings on apartheid and injustice and Nelson Mandela. Their questions are prefaced by: As a white African, how do you feel?
I can hear a man peeing as I reel off the words:
– I am not like the white South Africans you see on the BBC, in films. I condemn it.
But all I truly feel, as a circus freak, the white monkey, is every nerve and fibre under my skin wanting to kiss Zelda.
In the end, when the beer and the grass have gone to my head, Zelda comes back and takes my hand.
– Let’s go.
We go along the Gammel Strand, the old fish harbour. The sea wind gusts the blurry fuzz of the grass out of my head. At Nyhavn, Zelda buys us Underground ice-cream in tubs. And we walk all along the deserted harbourside to the mermaid’s rock, ice-cream melting on our tongues. I dare not mouth my hopes of tasting her lips and her skin again.
The tide comes in and islands the mermaid from the land. We sit there on the railing together while the moon dances on the sea, the same vanilla moon you can see from a farm at the far edge of the Atlantic, when the blood-orange sun goes down.
– I only have a visa for a fortnight. Then I don’t know where to go. If I go back to South Africa the police will pick me up at the airport. If I go back to England, the customsmen may not give me another tourist visa. I’m in a catch-22.
– Shhh, whispers Zelda. Worry tomorrow. For now you’re with me.
It is true. I am with the girl I love.
– I read your poems, Zelda whispers.
Then she tilts her face so I can kiss her. Her mouth is humid, her feral tongue forays deep into me, telling me she is no dream.
Then, as if awakened by the far windy whisper of a Zulu sangoma’s murmuring over scattered bones and cowrie shells, the mermaid slides from her rock into the sea. She heads out of the harbour, bound south for Cape Town to ferry Nelson Mandela across the shark-finned bay.
6,000 miles south one lone soul, a flapping scarecrow of a man, walks the long road from Paarl to Franschhoek. All day long he walks, guiding a Firestone tyre with two criss-crossed poles. As he walks, he mutters rumours of blood. It is hard to tell if the raggedy man is coloured, or white gone dark under the sun. Maybe the day will come when no one bothers if he is one or the other.
He walks under azure skies. He walks when snow lies on the Franschhoek mountains. He walks all day, until the sun goes down, blood orange, behind the Simonsberg.
Thanks to
DANIELA, WHO LOVED THIS story through all the sketches and drafts. Finn-Christian, who begged me time and again to tell of Africa in this far, foreign place. Mia, for whom Africa is guineafowl feathers
and Zulu beads. My folks for the vivid palette of my boyhood. My play shadow, Dean. The Heramb boys and Jabuz for the neverending games of cricket under the pines. James Scorer, Finn Spicer, Francois Tredoux for proofreading. Gillian Warren-Brown, Andrew Stooke, Sioux Damerell, Nantume Makumbi for their wise tips. Fish and the boys of Platoon 10. Zane Godwin, Peter Watson, Neil Wetmore and Johan Myburg for firing my dreaming in East London. Nigel and Alison Gwynne-Evans for giving me refuge in London. Caryn Edwards, David Grunberg, Meg Forster, Fréro Francois, Himali Upadhya and Andi Hänssig for their passion. Olivia Rose-Innes for honing my words. Russell Martin for his tuned eye. Isobel Dixon for her skill and soul. Meneer Coetzer and Mister Slater, teachers at Paarl Boys’ High, who gave me a sense of the world beyond the blackboard. Their voices still echo in my head. Delarey, wherever you are, for the free pints under a bitter moon. My students, who endured readings of the novel as it unravelled.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2005 by Troy Blacklaws
cover design by Barbara Brown
978-1-4804-1001-5
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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