by Rémy Ngamije
Séraphin watched his father slowly unwind and even sing the chorus when UB40’s “Bring Me Your Cup” came on. His mother turned in her seat and said to Séraphin, “Papa, he used to like reggae. Me I didn’t like it so much. I liked disco music. We liked dancing to this song when it came on the radio.”
“Pappa used to dance?” asked Séraphin, looking at the serious man behind the wheel.
“Your father was a serious dancer,” she replied.
He looked at his father and tried to imagine him dancing, being anything other than serious. His imagination could fathom X-Men, Gargoyles, and Darkwing Duck and everything Roald Dahl could stuff into his young mind. Friendly giants, twits who grew into their heads, and little girls who were too smart for their own families. But he could not imagine his father dancing.
Then, just like now, the width of the world from the shoreline was inviting and intimidating. His father, in black board-shorts and an old grey T-shirt, took turns walking Éric, Yves, and Séraphin into the water until it splashed up to their stomachs, holding them while they shrieked and clung to him in fear. The shock of the Benguela Current made prolonged time in the water impossible and when they started shivering his father walked them back to their mother, who sat above the tide-line, looking at something a great distance from where she was. She looked up at him, her tall, smiling husband, surrounded by their sons, and she was a long way from a fear which occasionally lanced through her, making her shiver.
“Is it a nice place, where you go?” Silmary asked, pulling him from his memory.
“It’s decent,” he replied. He finished his ice-cream. “Where to next?”
“Only thing that can chase ice-cream is fish and chips, duh.”
“I like her,” said the first Séraphin.
“Don’t we all,” said the second.
Kalky’s in Kalk Bay had its deep fryers gurgling with hot oil, chips and fish writhing in delicious agony. Séraphin and Silmary stood in the long queue that wound outside the shack. After placing their orders for hake and chips they spied a family vacating a table outside and rushed over to take it. From there they could see the harbour filled with sea-weathered boats. Near the restaurant, fisherwomen with sharp knives, their rough hands scarred, their skin leathery, descaled freshly caught fish. A waitress walked outside with a loaded tray. “Jirre!” she shouted. “Who is three-thirty-three? Is it you? Julle mense moet praat! I can’t sommer smell your order!”
“I like this place,” said Séraphin.
“It’s quaint,” said Silmary.
“Such a tourist word,” said Séraphin. “It’s always used to describe places that are the right kind of exotic to warrant one and only one visit.”
“Like what?”
“Ever gone to Mzoli’s with Europeans?” They’re too polite to see or say anything’s wrong, and they’re too anxious not to have an authentic township experience, so they settle on quaint.”
“What would you call this place then?”
“Smelly,” said Séraphin.
“Or dirty,” offered the first Séraphin, squeezing next to him.
“I’ll actually be disappointed if they bring us a tomato sauce bottle without the black crusty stuff on the nozzle,” said the second from his other side.
“That’s nasty,” said Silmary. Séraphin shrugged.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” said the third Séraphin, sitting down next to Silmary, “about your name. Where’s it from?”
“I guess now’s as good a time as any other,” Silmary said. She reached into her handbag, pulled out a purse and opened it. She placed a green identity book on the table. Séraphin lifted it and looked at the photograph inside. A younger Silmary looked back, frowning at the camera. Then he looked at the name.
“No fucking way,” said the first Séraphin.
“You’re joking,” said the second.
“Nope,” said Silmary.
“Silmary Lillian Joan Wallis,” Séraphin read aloud. “You’re named after the The Silmarillion.”
“My father loved the book and my mother’s an accepting woman.”
“That’s a badass name.”
“Séraphin’s pretty cool too.”
“When I found out what a seraph was I thought it was cool. The nuns at my primary school thought it was some sort of sign when I started there. They soon realised I wasn’t the chosen one though.”
“How come you’ve never been back to Rwanda?” she asked.
“I don’t feel like going gorilla-trekking.”
“Of course not, that’s the kind of thing Darth Boyfriends tend to do.”
“Yoh!” The first Séraphin clutched his heart.
“You went there,” said Séraphin.
“You were being a smart ass. You’ve still got family there, right?”
“I do. The whole clan thing. But it’s weird being related to so many people you don’t know.”
“Isn’t that family all of the time?”
“Good one,” said the third Séraphin.
“Anyway, home is that other place now,” he said.
“You can say its name without wincing, Séraphin,” said Silmary.
The waitress came out again, carrying a tray. “Number two-hundred-and-fifty-three. Two-five-three!”
Séraphin raised a hand. As the waitress placed the tray on the table she looked at the two of them and asked if they were together. The question caught both of them unawares and they looked at each other in surprise. Silmary recovered first. “We are here together,” she said.
“Meisiekind, if you’re not with him outside here then you must let me know.” She turned to Séraphin, “Boetie, are you single?”
“For you I could be,” replied the third Séraphin.
“You think you can handle me?”
“If you made it easy, I’d be disappointed.”
“Jirre! The only time I go down without a fight is when I go down.”
All of the Séraphins blinked rapidly and looked at each other. None of them had a reply. The serving woman laughed and moved on.
“You choked,” said Silmary.
“I totally wasn’t expecting that.”
They ate the hot, greasy chips with gusto and swallowed each others’ conversation just as greedily. Silmary told Séraphin that her parents travelled often, doing nebulous consultancy work for developmental agencies. The kinds of project initiatives she described her parents did sounded like the things any reasonable person might think of – clean water, mosquito nets, vaccines – but Séraphin did not voice these thoughts. Silmary had followed her parents around the world, first as squealing luggage when she was a child, and then as sulky baggage when she became a teenager. The constant uprooting and replanting had made friendships hard as she moved from one international school to another. The composition of the schools rarely changed. The offspring of American, British, and French diplomats were always clustered together for community with the children of the wealthy locals. While Séraphin considered it lucky to have moved around often, Silmary disagreed. Young loves were found and then lost whenever a ministerial project was concluded or a health centre was handed over to the community. Then it was time to pack up, stamp passports, fly away to a new country, and go through the motions all over again, of finding friends at a new school and watching old friends leave them behind. Silmary allowed her thoughts to trail into silence. They sat watching the fisherwomen. After a while Silmary perked up. “Tell me something,” she said.
“What?”
“Anything.”
So Séraphin told her lots of things. He told her about the blessed time when all that mattered in the world when he considered Brian Jacques’ Redwall series to be high literature. (She preferred Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.) He told her about kicking grandmothers. She agreed Ralph had it coming. Dale not so much. Then he told her about the time that Godwin, Richard, Adewale, and Yasseen were in a fight at a club because Godwin had danced with a Coloured girl whose boyfriend was
not happy with his girl’s rear being fondled on the dance floor. “You should’ve seen it. One minute we’re all gravy on the dance floor. Then out of nowhere Godwin is being manhandled by these huge Coloured guys. We’re in our first year, right, and we’re not the strapping gentlemen we are now—”
“Clearly,” said Silmary.
“—so we’re apologising but these guys are jonesing for a fight. Scuffle, scuffle, scuffle. We get thrown out of the club, because, obviously, it was the black guys who started the shit. We stopped going to Coloured clubs after that.”
“It’s a bit strange you call them that,” Silmary said. “Coloured clubs.”
“There are white clubs, black clubs, and Coloured clubs here,” said the second Séraphin. “And your enjoyment thereof and safety therein really depends on you being savvy enough to know which is which. In white clubs, don’t piss off the black bouncers. In black clubs, don’t piss off the dancers. In Coloured clubs, don’t piss off anyone. And I mean anyone. You’re playing with your life.”
“Where was Andrew? I never hear about Andrew in these stories.”
“He wasn’t part of the crew then,” said Séraphin. “We only met him in third year.”
“And by then it was too late to reform that white boy from his white boy ways,” said the first Séraphin.
“How’d you guys become friends anyway?”
“Proximity, I guess,” said Séraphin. “He just started hanging around us in res. Probably because of Rich. Or he liked having black friends. I don’t know.”
“When I met him he couldn’t stop going on about you guys, and all of the cool shit you all do. He was the star of most of the adventures.”
“Him?” scoffed the third Séraphin. “He’s like Madagascar on an African tattoo on a volunteer who came here and fell in love with the damn place. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not.” Silmary snorted into her food.
“Anyway, I guess Andrew’s all right. Sometimes he does some shit that makes you wonder whether he’s aware of present company. He tried to get us to befriend some jock friends and wondered why we wanted to kill them when we came to a braai and one of them called us the QBs – quota blacks. We left that braai before we had a damn drink. So that’s Andrew for you. Sometimes he’s cool. Sometimes he’s just Andrew.”
“Hmm.”
“These hmms are going to have to come with their own omniscient narrator soon,” said Séraphin. “Preferably with Morgan Freeman’s voice.”
“That hmm was for when we nearly hooked up and Andrew said he’d never been with a half-and-half.”
“That’s rough,” said the first Séraphin.
“But small evils are punished instantly,” Silmary said with a smirk. “He couldn’t get it up.”
“No!” said Séraphin.
“Yep.”
“That’s deep,” he said.
“He wasn’t,” she replied.
The first Séraphin fanned himself. “You’re just going in, aren’t you?”
“He didn’t.”
“Wow.”
“So what did you do when it happened?” asked the second Séraphin.
“He made it more awkward than it really was.”
“Big mistake,” said Séraphin. “Never panic. Just chill. Laugh it off. Get a conversation going.”
“It’s happened to you?” she asked.
“Many times,” said Séraphin. “First time it happened to me I wanted to boom tube off the planet. I’d been talking a whole lot of shit, promising to fundamentally restructure the laws of physics. When she gave me the chance biology failed me. Little man had clocked off for the weekend. The more I thought about it, the worse it got.” The Séraphins nodded along. “When you’re younger, little man nags you in class, on the lawns, in the shops, on the bus, in every single place and circumstance when you’re not supposed to be nagged. But then when he gets the call-up he decides to ghost. When that shit happens your nerd brain needs to kick in and pull conversations about random shit out of your ass crack. Another reason why guys need to read more. When one head lets you down the other should not.”
“You need to school your friend on some shit,” she said.
“I’m so sorry.”
“If I put it—” began the third Séraphin.
“So you guys aren’t together anymore?” Séraphin said quickly.
“We were never together.”
“Cool,” said Séraphin. “I mean, it’s not cool, for him, or, I don’t know. Whatever.”
“Let’s go with whatever.” They cleared their plates and decided to have words for dessert until the slant of the sun made them quieten down. “Home?” asked Silmary.
“Home,” said the Séraphins.
“You live here?” Séraphin asked as Yoda crawled through a security gate onto a courtyard of white gravel. They were in Camps Bay.
“This is my parents’ place,” Silmary said. “They aren’t here often, though.”
“People who have places like this tend not to live in them.”
The interior of the house looked like it had been put together from various centre spreads from House & Leisure. Tiles which had probably travelled more than he had to get there were arranged in intricate mosaics on the floor. There were Persian rugs. The art on the walls had more white frame than art, and the furniture was wooden, probably purchased at extortionate prices from a boutique store that had bought it for a song from some open-air carpenter. The house had the kind of neatness that came from not being lived in.
“I don’t like this house much,” said Silmary. She slipped off her shoes and walked through what Séraphin assumed was the lounge (because it had the most furniture designed to accommodate a human spine) and into a silver-soaked kitchen, where she poured them juice from the fridge. She suggested they sit on the balcony because the sunset view was the one thing that made the house liveable. “Put on some music first. I’m sure you can figure out how to work the sound system. And turn it up. I don’t really have neighbours.”
“Any requests?”
“Surprise me.”
“Well, no sunset has ever been complete without some jazz,” said the second Séraphin.
Annette Henshaw’s “We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye” spilled from the lounge onto the balcony. When Silmary heard the first notes she said, “This is the soundtrack of that hmm I should tell you about sometime.”
“When you’re ready.”
“Well, look at you not going after the dirt and the devil in the details.”
“I presume it’s a deep story. I can wait.” They sat on the balcony on cushioned deck chairs, watching the changing of the light guard in the sky. “This is nice,” said Séraphin after a while. “Today was a good day.”
“I’m glad,” said Silmary. She adjusted her position to face him her. “You know, I’ve only been trying to arrange your kidnapping for the longest while.”
“Why didn’t you do it sooner?”
“Well, first there was Andrew. Can’t be ditching someone for their friend the day you meet them, you know—”
“Totally,” said the first Séraphin, leaning over the balcony. “You do that later.”
“Like a civilised person,” said Silmary. “Anyway, then I had to figure out if you were available—”
“Hence the Bianca question,” said the second, going to stand next to the first.
“It always looked as though something was going on. And I couldn’t just ask for your number with everyone around. That would have been weird.”
“How did you get it, by the way?” the third asked. He sat at the end of Séraphin’s chair.
“Andrew’s phone.”
“That’s not strange at all,” Séraphin said.
“Right? That’s what I thought too,” she replied. “Imagine, after all of that I still had to figure out if you liked me or not.”
The second Séraphin chuckled. “People your colour don’t have to stress about stuff like race relations. Not really. Other
people, darker people do. That’s the worst part, liking someone and then having to figure out whether they could like someone like you, not even you, just your kind. But black guys are O-types – universal accepters.”
“Do you think this shit up beforehand or does it come to you?”
“Both.”
“What else comes to you?”
Séraphin climbed off his beach chair and went and straddled Silmary on hers. He leaned forward and kissed her. The lip-locking carried on for a few minutes before they paused to take a breath. Then they resumed, quicker, more fiercely, the air between their mouths traded with great fervour. She broke the contact and sat up in the chair. “We can stop. If you want,” Séraphin said.
“Don’t be foolish, Séraphin.” Her hands reached underneath his T-shirt and circled around to his back, running across the smooth skin, gripping the muscle.
“Morgoth,” the first Séraphin said suddenly.
“What?”
“The theft of the Silmarils,” Séraphin replied.
“I said you’re weird already, didn’t I?” She laughed lightly.
“But, no, you’re not him. The Silmarils were possessions. I am not.” She pushed him off gently and then rose from her chair. She took him by the hand and led him back into the house.
“Remember to lock the door,” the second Séraphin called as they passed.
The evening breeze picked up slightly. The three Séraphins sat looking up at the night sky, the widest ocean of them all, unmapped, where perhaps, monsters still lurked. They heard the playlist change inside, savoured the sound spillage from the lounge. Jamiroquai’s “Corner of The Earth” always brought a certain kind of tranquility with it.
“Man,” said the third, “this was such a good day.”
“Is,” said the first. “It’s still going.”
A sound from the house made their ears prick up. When they heard the sound again they grinned at each other.
“And so is the mighty Séraphin,” said the second.
“Godspeed!” said the third.
They remained on the balcony, trading nothing stories about nothing times, looking up at the yawning, star-speckled welkin above them, glad that distractions beat focus nine times out of ten.