by Trevor Sacks
We bought our stubs and entered the little gate. The rickety steel barely held us in our seat as we lurched, then sagged, then rose up again. The Ferris wheel moved much faster than I would’ve liked; I was hoping for a languid sweep but it was neither that nor the kind of thrill you get from a rollercoaster.
The town sank before us, prostrating itself and exposing the furrows and the tracts.
‘I fucking hate this place,’ I said.
‘It’s not so bad,’ said Elliot. He was always so contrary. We dipped again and the town closed up.
While we rose and were allowed that particular view of the town, it was easy to imagine that its blocks had been wrapped with ribbons or corralled into pens. There was none of the fractal mess of the stony sidewalks, plastic packets and trembling hate and fear. You could almost start to like it.
It was much greener from up there. The town was a dark patch, as if water had spilled onto the dry bushveld and a settlement had formed like moss, or mould. Our own Eiffel Tower, the red-and-white radio pylon, pierced the surface, and the Nedbank building was there too, still the only really high structures in town.
Then you were brought low again and the town was hidden by the rough bushes. The circle of motion brought you down among the calls and carousing of children, a father punishing the buttocks of a six-year-old with shorn hair.
‘Hey, moffies!’ shouted a teenage boy down on the ground. He was a thin kid, maybe fifteen or sixteen, who’d been standing with the others who’d hassled us earlier. The boy smiled up at us. From up on the wheel his blond, cropped hair shone against his skinny, brown face, innocent as a plush toy. Others were looking up at us now, too.
Elliot showed him the finger as we rose away from him but we both became uncomfortable in our two-seater gondola. The Afrikaans boy puckered his lips and moved on.
I was still cooling off from this embarrassment when I noticed a girl waiting at the bottom with a friend. She was wearing sunglasses with mirrored lenses, and blew a bubble with her gum. It popped. She followed us up with her mirror glasses and I kept her position stable in my view as we rolled down once more.
Her head jibbed so gracefully, I thought, atop her brown neck. I smiled at her; she didn’t smile back. Maybe she couldn’t see me, maybe I was too high when I smiled. I smiled again, still wider; she only looked, and popped her gum between her lips, and chewed down on it again.
It seemed antagonistic. To take my mind off her and the moffie-baiter, I asked Elliot if he’d heard from Will, although I already knew that they never spoke, and knew about each other only through intermediaries, if at all. ‘I went to visit him in Pretoria,’ I said. ‘He’s in the army.’
‘I heard. Was that to run away from the gambling debts?’
‘No – he works for the officers’ magazine.’ I decided to keep the karate demo to myself.
‘What ever happened to his court case? Getting our money back and all that?’
‘He’s still working on it.’
‘Is that what he says? Still working on it? Five years later?’
‘He is,’ I said.
‘He’s all bullshit, you know.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if he was here.’
‘You still believe him, then?’
Whatever new desperation I’d sensed on my trip to Pretoria, whatever Uncle Victor thought about him, I was trying to cling to my faith in Will. Elliot’s doubting had been a constant feature over the years, one I’d been able to put aside in my affiliation to Will, but now it was becoming harder to dismiss.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, pretending that Will’s unreliability didn’t bother me, one way or the other.
‘No, it really doesn’t.’
‘I don’t care. We’ll be okay,’ I said.
‘Yes, you will.’
‘I mean, it’s good you’re back now.’
‘Ja, but I’m not staying. You know that, right?’
‘Oh, ja. Of course.’
‘So what are you gonna do?’
‘Me?’
‘You could go to the army, too,’ said Elliot.
‘You think I should go? I don’t want to go.’
‘I don’t think you should. I don’t think anyone should. But you’ve got to do something, right?’
‘Like what? I was supposed to report for duty in Phalaborwa in January. If they find me, it’s six years in prison.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘But maybe.’
‘Fuck, Ben. You need to sort out your fucking life. You’re eighteen already.’
I’m only eighteen, I was thinking. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s not your problem, I can take care of myself. It’s Ma I’m worried about. That’s why it would’ve been good if Will got us the money back.’
‘Don’t use her as an excuse for you to sit on your arse and do nothing.’
‘You sound like Victor now.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Fuck, man,’ I said, growing in strength after his apology.
‘I worry about her, too. But I can’t fucking stay here,’ he said, blinking at the town on the horizon.
‘Maybe I can come with you.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, then turned in his seat towards me. ‘Listen, Will’s not gonna get any money, if there is any money to begin with. I predict Will is gonna be nothing but a burden on Ma. The best we can do is to avoid being burdens ourselves. Everyone has to be self-sufficient now, okay? That girl,’ he said with barely a pause in his speech, ‘is she looking at us?’
‘I think so.’
‘Hard to tell with those check-me-check-you-backs she’s got on. Her friend’s not interested. But interesting.’
We came down one last time and got out. I kept my eyes on the girl with the glasses and she, I believe, turned hers away.
‘How about letting us take you two for a spin?’ said Elliot without consulting me.
‘Ja, okay,’ said the one with the glasses, chewing her gum. Her friend had the F of ‘fokof’ already perched on her lips – because she was the one Elliot had asked, actually, a tall girl in cowboy boots, with brown hair that ran to the small of her back – but she swallowed it and followed her friend.
Elliot and I handed over our ticket stubs to the ride operator and when we turned towards the big wheel again, Mirror Glasses grabbed my wrist. She pulled it, me, onto the carriage, leaving Cowboy Boots and Elliot to figure out their own seating arrangements.
Mirror Glasses had blonde hair to her shoulders and a fringe that lay over the top of the shades. Naturally I exploded a fantasy of this girl, and I don’t mean a sexual one (although projections of her unclothed body flashed inevitably, too). No, I had an unstoppable reel playing of our future together: she laughing, a tender moment between us, meeting families, sharing meals – the sort of embarrassing and uncontrolled ideas I would do anything to hide from my friends, and myself, to keep an outward appearance of hardness intact, paper-thin as it was.
And immediately afterwards I flooded with doubts, questioned whether I could stand to spend even the next five minutes of the ride with this person who was sure to coalesce into a palpable disappointment of the kind this town was expert in turning out.
The cradle rose, lifting us up and, for a moment, away from the noise of the town show. At the top the quiet lingered and stuck us up there with nothing to say. ‘Where do you live?’ she asked with belligerence.
I was about to point. ‘Oh, it’s gone,’ I said as the town dipped beneath the treetops. ‘I’ll show you next time. What’s your name?’
‘You don’t ask that, stupid. It’s not a good question.’
‘Oh.’ I was being educated already. Who knew what a good question or a bad one was when it came to girls, when the last sexual encounter you had was squeezing Potato Latke’s spud breast at the end of primary school?
‘I live that side,’ she said and pointed towards Fauna Park.
‘I’m kind of there,’ I said. ‘By the municipal pool.
’
‘You like to swim a lot?’
‘Not really.’
‘What a waste.’ Her arms were so brown and healthy-looking. She probably loved to swim, probably was one of the cruel kids who hogged the pool and goaded others onto and off the diving board. It was a wonder to me that anyone so healthy would want to be next to me.
I suppose Elliot had been the flare that had drawn her attention our way. Why she’d chosen to ride with me, I couldn’t say. Perhaps she saw I was closer in age, more malleable to her will, or that Elliot’s outrageousness was too much for her but my association with him was just the right amount; or perhaps she and her friend in the cowboy boots had divvied us up in some negotiation.
I peeked behind us at Elliot and Cowboy Boots. They were looking in opposite directions. She stole a glance at the war feather dreadlocks, crossed her arms and turned away again.
I scrambled for a new question. ‘So are you in school?’
‘Bad question.’
‘Do you like to swim?’ I tried.
‘Are you in school?’
‘I thought it was a bad question.’
‘Not if I ask.’
‘I finished last year,’ I said.
‘Studying?’
‘No.’
‘So you’re going to the army?’
‘Not if I can help it.’
‘Goin’ AWOL.’ She was Afrikaans but said it in a perfect American accent, like it was the title of a Hollywood sequel.
‘I suppose.’
‘Don’t let my brother hear that. He’ll turn you in to the military police.’
‘Is your brother in the army?’
‘My brother wants to be in the army but my mom won’t let him leave school yet. Thanks for the ride,’ she said, getting off the carriage at the bottom. Cowboy Boots stepped quickly to her friend’s side.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Okay.’
They turned and walked, arm in arm. ‘Aren’t you coming for a drink?’ said Mirrors.
Elliot and I hurried behind them towards the food and drinks tents. The two girls pushed their way through the crowd at the bar and we squeezed behind them, between bellies and beer breath, apologising with our looks.
‘To say thank you for the ride,’ said Mirrors, and she handed me and Elliot tequila shooters. She was almost elbowed off the bar but elbowed back and ordered more. We took a tray with tequilas and lager in plastic cups to an upright table at the marquee wall.
‘That’s a lot of thank yous,’ I said.
She did the American accent again. ‘Just open your mouth and say you’re welcome.’ The sunglasses were betwixt strands of hair now, pushed up onto her head, and I chased after a pair of quick, dark eyes that refused to serve up all they had in one sitting; when they did remain still, I was too scared to keep looking.
She poured another shot down my mouth.
‘You’re welcome, too,’ said Elliot to Cowboy Boots but she smirked at him, kind of sarcastic, and took up her own tequila. ‘What’s your name?’ Elliot asked her.
‘Don’t ask them that,’ I said. ‘It’s boring.’
‘Now you’re getting it,’ said Mirrors.
‘Well, thank you, whoever,’ said Elliot and he threw tequila into his mouth.
Cowboy Boots took another. ‘You’re welcome.’
… Thank you, you’re welcome, thank you, you’re welcome, thank you, you’re welcome, thank you …
The boom-chick rhythm and alternating two-note bass line of a song I’d heard a thousand times in passing cars, in shops, on radio and in the Action Bar harangued us from the speakers. I watched Elliot and Cowboy Boots embark on a snide course of exchanges as the tequila boosted us.
Elliot would ask a question about the referendum and she’d look the other way. He’d ask her about her boots and she’d pull them under the stool and cross her arms. He’d ask if she seriously liked the music she was tapping her foot to and she’d shrug.
‘Your hair looks like worms,’ said Boots.
‘This from someone who dresses like Axl Rose?’
‘What’s wrong with Axl?’ said Boots, hurt.
‘Nothing,’ said Elliot, looking away. ‘I love Axl.’
After a long wait at the bar with Elliot’s money, I bought us some beers to dilute the tequilas. When I returned, Mirrors was sitting with her arms crossed and Elliot and Boots were half-perched on a stool, half-leaning into passing drinkers and locked together at the mouth. What had I missed?
A wide man in a khaki shirt pushed them both back when they careered into him, one of Elliot’s worms almost dipping into the man’s beer. The man called them both dirty and delivered his beers to a nearby table. A short while later, the man and two friends – brothers, perhaps, in the same blue-and-khaki shirts – returned and stood at our table.
‘You’re sitting on my seat,’ said the one. His ankle boots were very neatly laced and he had a fleshy forehead into which either a diagonal crease or a scar (I couldn’t tell which) lay embedded.
Elliot unlocked his mouth from the girl’s and swung a stool in front of the man with the creased forehead. Elliot and the girl fell onto an unused one together.
‘That one’s mine,’ said the other khaki sibling, tapping his velskoen to an Erasure tune that had started up. He had the same wide build as his brother, though he was younger and training a strip of fluff on his lip into a moustache.
‘And those,’ said the first khaki.
‘You’re sitting on all of them?’ I asked.
‘Our friends are,’ said the second.
‘You’ve got friends?’ said Mirrors.
‘We were here first,’ said Khaki 1.
‘Oh, I think I’ve heard this joke before,’ said Elliot. ‘To the big wheel!’ He led us out the tent, an arm around Cowboy Boots’s neck.
‘The rollercoaster!’ said the girls.
Our guts dragged behind us, above us, anywhere but in us, and I knew I had to hold on to that bar because it wouldn’t hold us, so old was the ride. So I held on, trying not to look like I was scared and Mirrors, right next to me, held on to me, unafraid to look afraid.
‘This is my uncle’s car,’ said Elliot as we left the showgrounds. ‘You can’t be sick in it.’
‘Okay,’ said Cowboy Boots, ‘I just wanna be sick out of it.’ She hung her head out the window of Victor’s Audi while Mirrors and I sat so close our arms sweated onto each other.
We went to Boots’s house, since her folks were away for the weekend, and herded Boots towards a back door while an Alsatian and a Labrador cross barked at us behind a diamond-mesh fence.
We entered through a kitchen tiled in colours like toffee and fudge. Boots was propped on Elliot’s shoulder and he hauled her to her bedroom. ‘Is she okay?’ I asked.
Mirrors shrugged. She and I walked into the living room area and sat on a heavily padded couch. I picked up a yellow glass ashtray in a stretched snot-like shape and put it back down again. Mirrors sat down on the orange rug on the ground and sighed.
The silence was broken by Elliot walking into the kitchen; he started rifling through the cupboards, then stood again and briskly walked back to the bedroom with a roll of black dustbin bags and a plastic bucket. He was always practical in an emergency.
‘Hey, let’s watch this one,’ said Mirrors. It was an old VHS of Back to the Future. The movie began and here on a strange girl’s friend’s parents’ couch, in front of a movie that was as familiar to me as my life, I kissed Mirrors – or rather, she kissed me.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, which made me think, of course, that I was doing it wrong. ‘I don’t know if I should let you.’
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘No. We don’t have to.’
‘Well, I don’t wanna waste my time.’
‘Sure.’
‘I wanna make sure you know what you’re doing.’
But I didn’t know what I was doing. I was guessing. My life had been, through my entire school career, utterly devoid of sex. I was
always ashamed that it was taking me so long to cross that particular threshold whenever I saw movies with American teenagers humping through high school, even the nerd getting it on after the prom.
I discovered what I knew about sex the same way I discovered everything else I knew about the world: from books. Well, magazines too.
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘Are you gonna touch me first?’
Um. ‘Yes.’
‘How?’ she asked.
‘How?’
‘Show me. Here.’ She took my hand and placed it in the flesh of her thigh, the soft space behind the knee.
Come on, finger, you must know what to do. ‘Okay,’ she said. I stroked, I circled, I gently squeezed the tendon while George McFly danced solo at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to get you into trouble.’
She lay out on the couch and I lay behind her. ‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘Let’s sleep.’
I obeyed the girl and we lay down on the couch together. I draped my arm across Mirrors’ side in the dip above her denim-skirted waist. We watched a mother try to French kiss a boy in a 1950s automobile and Mirrors began to fade.
It was some time around when George socks Biff Tannen that Mirrors started rubbing against me. She took my hand and placed it in the soft depths under her denim skirt while Marty McFly played the prom.
It was a catalogue of new discoveries for me: just how smooth a girl’s thighs are, the modesty of her pubic hair so unlike my own bush, the solidity of the bones beneath that generous fleshiness and a sweet wetness forming. Conscious of all the new things my hands were doing, I became aware once again, as she pressed into my body and I pressed back, that I was allowed some pleasure in the action also. Meanwhile, Marty McFly’s hand looked see-through and he lost his ability to play guitar.
‘Naai my,’ whispered Mirrors, turning her head towards me – ‘fuck me’ in Afrikaans. Angry and sexy: two things Afrikaans does well.
‘This is a blues riff in B,’ said Marty. ‘Watch me for the changes and try ’n keep up.’ Not entirely in rhythm to ‘Johnny B. Goode’ I writhed in that wetness that I found both surprising and familiar, and gave myself over to it before the end of the blazing guitar solo.
Mirrors fell asleep right away. A hall filled with 1950s schoolkids watched with a kind of horror on their faces; I watched back with a grateful, dazed smile on mine.