The Eternal Audience of One

by Rémy Ngamije

  Bianca took a seat in the middle, with Yasseen and Séraphin on her left and Richard and Adewale on her right. “So you’re telling me only Yasseen got sauced in the holidays? Really? Rich, I can understand for now. Just trying to stay alive in Zim is a mission. Addy too. You know these people from company churches only get freaky at Easter or when the Angel Gabriel tells them they’re permitted to sow their seed. I was chasing someone, but then she decided she was still into guys. Séra genuinely lives in a desert. But, damn, Yaz is the only one carrying the team.”

  Séraphin let out a pardon-the-interruption kind of cough. Bianca raised an eyebrow. “I, err,” Séraphin began, “may, err, have stumbled across an oasis in the desert.”

  “Spill! Who is she?”

  Séraphin sipped his water for longer than any normal sip should be when scandalous gossip is being shared.

  “Jasmyn,” he said.

  Bianca’s other eyebrow joined its companion. Richard put down his beer. Adewale coughed. Yasseen smirked into his glass of juice. “No fucking way,” said Bianca.

  Séraphin filled them in on the unexpected encounter at the shop, the exchange of numbers – “Damn, she was really after you!” said Bianca – and then the meeting at her house. And then everything else that came after, all of this to hoots of laughter.

  “So, six years later you got to expend the nut that got you into trouble. Shit, man, your life is unreal,” said Bianca. When Godwin arrived a few moments later and squeezed in beside Adewale, he demanded a retelling of the Jasmyn saga.

  “Man,” he said at the end of Séraphin’s narration, “at least you closed that chapter.”

  “How was Zim?” Séraphin asked him.

  “Bulawayo wasn’t that interesting.” Godwin’s deep voice was nonchalant when he described the empty supermarkets, the intermittent power, and the censored newspapers. The exodus of people leaving the country was continuing but his countrymen were running out of places to go. Fewer and fewer of the countries surrounding Zimbabwe were welcoming of the new Southern African refugees.

  “And yet you’re also planning on going back when you finish your Master’s,” said Séraphin. “In finance, even. You want to work in a country without money.”

  “Yes,” said Godwin. “It sucks now, but it’ll get better. It has to.” Richard nodded agreement. Séraphin and Adewale shared a look across the table. Theirs was not the way of hopeful patriotism.

  Fallon materialised with a notepad and a pen. “Are you ready to order?”

  “Without Andrew or James?” asked Richard.

  “Yes,” said Godwin. “I’m hungry.”

  Their regular patronage had made them familiar with the menu so the ordering was quick. Yasseen and Richard asked for The Road Least Taken.

  “I want meat,” said Bianca. She waited for the “That’s what she said” response which arrived punctually. “Desiderata for me,” she said. Richard and Godwin ordered the same. Séraphin asked for Paradise Lost. “Is that a new one?”

  Fallon said it was. It contained a chicken and pork patty drowning in three cheeses, with red onion, gherkins, and Japanese mayonnaise to top it off. “If I didn’t want to see you try to finish it I would say non serviam,” she said to Séraphin.

  “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” he shot back.

  “Clever.” Fallon clicked her pen, attached it to her notebook, and left.

  “What was that about?” asked Bianca.

  “Nothing,” said Séraphin.

  While they waited for their food they spoke about the coming year. For all of them except Adewale it would be their final year in Remms. Bianca wanted to do her articles in Johannesburg. Cape Town, she said, was becoming frustrating. Her family was not entirely accepting of her sexual orientation and she longed to be distanced from judgement and the faintly nurtured hopes that she would find a good Coloured boy and get married. “I swear, my parents are ready to auction my ovaries to the highest bidder. They don’t understand that even if I was straight I wouldn’t necessarily like Coloured guys. But they push it. They say it’s easier when you have similar backgrounds.”

  “They wouldn’t complain if you brought a white guy home,” said Séraphin.

  “Of course not,” said Bianca. “That’d be like winning the lottery. They’d be so happy. Super light-skinned babies with hair that doesn’t hate the weather – the Cape Coloured dream.”

  Surprisingly, Yasseen was also considering moving to Johannesburg. His reasons were simple. He had lived his entire life in Cape Town and wanted to live somewhere else. “If I stay I can’t move out because it isn’t the done thing, you know. They’ll think I’m looking for an excuse to engage in haram activities.”

  Richard and Godwin were quite determined to go back to Zimbabwe. Séraphin was the only one without a clear direction. “I’ll just take it a day at a time, see what happens,” he said. He tried to make it sound calm, planned, and even welcomed.

  James’s arrival was greeted warmly. He sat next to Séraphin. He had come straight from the Remms Law Faculty where he was working as a research assistant. He was completing his Master’s degree in property law and his supervisor had demanded that he put in a couple of extra hours to complete an assignment. The soft-spoken Kenyan hadn’t flown home to Nairobi to visit his family over the holidays because he had too much work to do before the new academic year began. He’d met with Adewale occasionally but without the rest of the group around it often felt strained. Both of them were the recipients of grant money, but while Adewale’s would wriggle out of his bank account and find its way into extravagant threads and colognes, James’s would be saved and sent home to his family. The familial responsibility to look after his kin was something Séraphin admired in James, and, when he was especially feeling distant and unattached to home, envied.

  Fallon and another waitress passed around the meals. She asked James if he wanted to order. He declined. Séraphin offered to share with him and asked Fallon to fetch them an extra plate. As they tucked into their food the chatter continued. James was looking forward to completing his assistantship at the end of year and also to handing in his thesis. Then he was moving back home to Kenya. “I’ve been here long enough,” he said. “I need to work in a place without all of this race drama. In Nairobi a black man can be a black man.”

  “You can be a black man anywhere you want, my friend,” said Godwin between bites. “All that changes is whether you can be a black man all of the time.”

  “This place’ll make you choose, though,” said James. “Trust me, I see it all the time in the law faculty. Either I remain docile, play along, back up my supervisor’s ideas with my own, or challenge them and risk being branded a radical.”

  “Radicals don’t get funded,” said Adewale. “Don’t even play those games. Not while the university is paying your fees. Avoid the politics, put in the hours, hand in your thesis, and get the degree.”

  The conversation had taken a disheartening turn. Eventually, something would be said, or done, which brought race to the fore. It always seemed to be a constant concern in Cape Town. It would appear in jokes to summarise and localise the punchline; and in insults to sharpen the bite. At first, Séraphin had taken it as a Capetonian quirk, a habit of geography. Much like how Namibians complained about the heat in summer and the cold in winter. Race talk in Cape Town, though, was quite the opposite. Its invocation in conversation painted lines and built fences; huffy intakes of breath signalled people retreating to safe corners of ideology. Among his friends conversations of race were generally frank. At other times, especially among new company, or in lecture theatres, any mention of race was either met with a stuffy silence or apologetic statements usually followed with humourless he-hes.

  Richard, who always ate quickly, was already wiping his fingers with a napkin. He glanced at his phone and told the group that Andrew was looking for parking. A few minutes later Andrew arrived in the entrance. He looked around, spotted them and then turned his atten
tion to someone still coming up the stairs.

  “Howzit, gents?” he said as he approached. He touched knuckles with everyone at the table in greeting. Andrew was the oldest of the crew, completing his political science honours degree, and a serial traveller, albeit with numerous complaints. He was a stalwart T-shirt and shorts kind of person. Tonight, though, he had made a determined effort to appear anything but. The results were, as Bianca and Séraphin would discuss in private later, actually impressive. He wore a sky blue shirt with a Chinese collar. Charcoal skinny jeans with the ends folded neatly floated just above a pair of white nubuck high top sneakers. The precise word that popped into Séraphin’s mind as he looked at Andrew was “dashing”. He told him so.

  “Thanks,” Andrew said. He turned to his companion who had just walked up to their booth. “This is Silmary.”

  Everyone not seated at either end of the booth cursed their punctuality; they wouldn’t get to sit next to her. The two who stood a chance played rock, paper, and scissors with fate, both hoping Andrew would sit next to the other, leaving one of them to have the honour. Silmary waved a slender wrist at everyone and said, “Hi.”

  She was dressed simply. Blue jeans and a tight white blouse showed off exquisite collarbones and a slender neck. Her hair was the colour of freshly brewed coffee. When Séraphin mentioned this later to Bianca she’d nodded and said she had been tempted to reach forward and smell its aroma. It ran, unbound, all the way to the middle of her lower back, in semi-straight tresses. Here and there were slight curls. Her eyes were green and flecked with brown. Her smile looked game for something reckless. Séraphin guessed that if she stood next to him she would come up to his chest. If she had to kiss him she would have to stand on the tips of her toes. What Séraphin could not figure out, and what everyone else was thinking, too, was what to call her skin colour. One part, for sure, had to be black. Maybe not her parents, but somewhere along the line there had to be. Séraphin was certain that if she identified with blackness it would welcome her beauty with open arms. He had seen it in Windhoek and Cape Town alike, the keenness for black people to possess or to be affiliated with any lightness of skin that had any connection to them. Blackness needed and demanded that it be chosen, becoming hostile in instances when it was not. Whiteness was never miffed. It already possessed everything that counted. It let the other races feast on scraps.

  Andrew decided to sit next to James, which meant Silmary would sit next to Godwin. Godwin had the look of a man who had desperately desired to win some great prize and, now confronted with it, was in distress about his victory. He shuffled so close to Adewale it looked like he was afraid to touch Silmary.

  “You’re late, man,” said Richard, “we’ve already eaten.”

  “It’s okay,” Andrew replied. “I ate at Silmary’s place already.” He dropped the information with calculated nonchalance. It was met with as much joy as Little Boy’s mushroom cloud over Hiroshima.

  I ate at Silmary’s place already.

  He had been invited to her place. Séraphin imagined an apartment in Green Point or Sea Point. They had probably cooked together, with wine, and jazz music. Louis Jordan or Stéphane Grappelli. Séraphin hoped they had burnt the food. But if they’d burnt it then that would have hastened the march towards making out. Okay, so they cooked, and then they ate, on white plates which remained white even if they were stained with spaghetti bolognaise reddened by too much tomato paste. Then they had retired to a couch, with wine glasses, the playlist probably changed to something slower: Nina Simone or Ella Fitzgerald. While Séraphin was making his way to The Good Night, Andrew and Silmary had probably been kissing And while he had been sitting there on his own, waiting for the rest of the group to arrive, hands had probably slipped under shirts, fumbling towards some frantically sought glory.

  I ate at Silmary’s place already.

  Séraphin took a deep breath and sighed. His phone vibrated in his pocket and he reached for it, looking at the message under the table.

  BeeEffGee—Sans_Seraph: Séra!

  Sans_Seraph: I know!

  BeeEffGee: This girl!

  Sans_Seraph: I KNOW!

  BeeEffGee: How did Drew find her? WHERE DID HE FIND HER?

  Sans_Seraph: I. DON’T. FUCKING. KNOW!

  “Bianca, Yasseen, Séraphin, and this is James. They’re all in law school which, generally, would make them insufferable but they’re actually cool,” said Andrew. Séraphin looked up from his phone in time to smile at her. “These are the guys,” said Andrew. When he saw Silmary look at Bianca with a raised eyebrow, he said, “She’s lesbian. So she’s a dude for all intents and purposes.”

  “Except I’m not,” said Bianca crisply.

  “Well,” said Andrew, with a little laugh that totally ignored the icicles that had crept into Bianca’s voice, “sometimes I can’t be sure.”

  “That’s probably when you should ask,” Bianca said. “Or shut up.”

  Richard let out a deep chuckle. “Andrew, you’ve been missed.”

  “By someone,” shot Bianca, “somewhere.”

  “Shots!” piped up Yasseen.

  “Really, guys,” said James. “In new company?”

  “So you’re the High Lords of Empireland,” Silmary said. She looked amused.

  Everyone turned to Andrew. He raised his hands placatingly and said, “We were just talking, man.”

  “I don’t know what he told you,” Séraphin began, “but believe me, it’s better if someone else tells the story. Andrew is the worst at telling stories.”

  “What story?” asked Silmary.

  “Yes,” said Bianca, “what story?

  “There’s no story here,” said Richard. “None, nada, zilch, zero.”

  “Nothing to see here, move along, move along,” coughed Godwin. After the laughter had settled down he asked Silmary where she was from.

  “I guess,” she said, “from all over. I’ve lived in Angola, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Morocco, Tunisia, and Switzerland. I grew up in all of those places. My parents moved around a lot.” Her father was a development consultant. “I just moved to Cape Town about three months ago for Master’s at UCT. English, by the way.”

  “And why, for all that is good and holy on this earth, do you know Andrew?”

  “You’ve got jokes,” Andrew said.

  Everyone, though, was wondering the same thing.

  “My father and his father worked together on a housing project a while ago. Figured one friendly face in Cape Town would be nice.”

  “She said he has a face,” Godwin said.

  “A friendly one,” Yasseen added.

  “Truly, kindness is still a thing in this world.”

  “Assholes,” Andrew said.

  “I’m sorry,” Bianca said, “but what are you? I have to know just so I don’t spend the next couple of days on hair and skin care products trying to look like you.”

  Silmary laughed a little. “My mom is half-Angolan, half-Portuguese and my dad is Swiss.”

  “You can’t buy that on a Clicks shelf, can you?”

  “Sorry, Bee,” said Séraphin. “You’re still going to have to check the weather forecast before you decide to straighten your hair.”

  “Fuck you, Séra.”

  “Where’re you guys from?” Silmary looked around the table.

  Adewale did the explaining. “Bianca and Yasseen are from Cape Town, fortunately for them; James is Kenyan, nostalgically; Rich and Godwin are Zimbo, proudly and deludedly; I’m Nigerian, reluctantly; you know all about Andrew, I’m sure. But if you don’t, he’s an asshole.” Everyone thumped the table in agreement. “Which leaves Séraphin, who’s Rwandan but lives in Namibia and, generally, would like to be from elsewhere.”

  Fallon came by again to ask if Andrew and Silmary wanted to order anything. Andrew and Silmary declined. Her gaze lingered on Silmary.

  “I think it’s time for wise words,” said Richard. It was the signal to get the bill.

&n
bsp; “I think so too,” said Séraphin.

  “You had help with your burger,” Fallon said. “I’m a bit disappointed.”

  “I know. But I’m sure I could’ve finished it by myself if I was in the mood.”

  Fallon snorted. “Of course you could. You’d have had to pack it for breakfast.”

  “Hey, hey,” said Séraphin, “if it’s doggy it ain’t in a bag.” Jeers swept the table. Fallon blushed as she left to fetch their bill. When she returned she placed the little tin can with the bill in the middle of the table. Richard was about to reach for it to calculate everyone’s portion when Adewale stopped him.

  “I can never get used to this thing of splitting bills,” Adewale said. “It’s just strange. This one’s on me.”

  “The scholarship money has come through, has it?” asked Andrew.

  “Maybe,” said Adewale. He counted out the rands, folding them in next to the bill. The table murmured their thanks. “Right,” he said, “let’s go out.”

  One by one they slid out of the booth and started towards the exit.

  “Where’re we going?” asked Godwin rhetorically.

  “Same place we go to all the time,” said Richard drily.

  “Where’s that?” asked Silmary.

  “The very bowels of hell,” said Bianca. “If you’ve never been felt up in a club, then you need to get ready. Because where we’re going you’re going to have semis pressed against your leg.”

  “It isn’t that bad. Plus, you’re with us,” said Richard. “Safety in numbers.”

  “Correction,” said Bianca. “Safety with male numbers.”