Cruel Crazy Beautiful World (17 page)

It feels too tacky now to tell her I too want to see the world. It would sound borrowed and callow. Yet I sense I’d want to see it in another way to her. Just the music in the name of a town lures me. I have no defined plan to see any landmarks or to capture anything. I doubt I’d take photographs. I’d just want to drift maplessly through Malacca or Mandalay or Timbuktu or wherever and live the vibe and sip cold beers in dusty cafés and write poems or whatever fell into my head. I’d earn money as I went along by playing my guitar on street corners. (Another Zero mantra:
You’ll never starve if you can play the guitar
.)

I wonder if Zero has money pocketed away or if the profits from his gigs just tide him over. Perhaps he rides an old Benz not just out of fondness for the square old box, but because he doesn’t have the money to fork out for a Z3 or something jazzy. I may inherit the house in time ... if Phoenix’s old foes don’t find him and burn it down. But that jaded, viewless house so far from the sea would hardly fetch a fortune.

– And me? I’m just a poor boy?

– Not just. You are absurdly beautiful.

I spit out half a laugh. Take note, O Professor.

– You play the guitar sublimely. And you have a way with words that drugs me. And yet ...

– I see.

And I’d had the gall to imagine that if the stars aligned otherwise for us, or if a coin fell tails instead of heads, or if the moon tugged harder ...

A
FARM SOMEWHERE JUST
outside Bloemfontein.

Farmhouse lights burn yellow on a low hill a few miles ahead. Zero cuts the headlights and they ride on by the light of the moon. They abandon the Benz a mile or so from the house and go on by foot.

Two Isuzu pickups are parked in the yard. A boerboel dog hurtles towards them, rattling a deep bark from his canines.

Phoenix darts him down. He fondles the dog’s ears as he slides into puzzled slumber.

They find the dirty, dented Cherokee in the garage.
TOLK
-. The telltale letters kill any doubts.

The door of the farmhouse is ajar.

There’s a TV on (Paul Newman cycling a bicycle in circles) and muffled sounds from below.

They steal down dark cellar steps. Now they hear a whimpering, followed by men laughing. Phoenix goes ahead, lizardly stalking the light at the end of the steps.

A bottle of Old Brown sherry goes from hand to hand among three men. They stand around a crazed-eyed girl with a handkerchief balled in her mouth. She’s on tiptoes, hands tied over her head to a hook in the roof. Her torn dress hangs like shed skin from her hips. Another girl, head hanging down, is tied to a bentwood chair in the corner. She’s naked from head to foot.

The hardtack dulls the senses of the men, but the strung-up girl sees him and her eyes flare.

Phoenix signals to her to stay still. Then he puts the blowpipe to his lips.

A man smacks at his calf, thinking he’s been stung by something waspy. His hand comes away filmed in blood. He’s puzzled by the dart jutting out of his skin. By the time he cottons on and spins round, the world’s tilting. He keels over.

Now Zero’s on the bottom step, his Colt levelled at the other two men.

– Hands up, boys!

One man foolishly goes for a gun in his pocket. Zero puts a bullet into his foot.

The man howls as he hops on his unshot foot.

The third man dives behind the girl on the bentwood. Now he has a blade at her throat.

At that moment Jabulani peeps his head into the cellar. This freaks the guy out and blood slides subtly from under the blade.

– I’ll kill her. I’ll fucking ...

Zero’s bullet fillips his head. His blood fans out against a swastika flag on the wall.

Though the cut is just skin-deep the girl’s voice is a crazy chorus of cicadas in a box.

Zero tugs the flag off the wall to throw over the corpse.

Then he pans a video camera, zooming in on the fear-ridden eyes of the whimpering, foot-shot farmer.

To him Zero jibes:

– You’ll need a vivid imagination to come up with a story your wife falls for, hey?

The farmer lets out a sob.

– Not so cool now, hey?

Turns out, fortuitously, the darted guy’s the Cherokee farmer. They tie him up with nylon ropes he’d used on the girl and bundle him into the boot of the Benz. He mumbles mumbo-jumbo. They stuff the spit-wet gag in his gob.

Zero tasks Phoenix and Jabulani with ferrying the girls to Cape Town on the back seat of the Cherokee.

Canada Dry shoots out the tyres of the Isuzu.

They let the one with the shot foot go. He hobbles along the dusty farm road after the fading red eyes of the Cherokee.

The only thing left alive in the farmyard is a dog under a sneezewood dreaming of catching ever-elusive moles. The spicy scent of the sneezewood pervades the world.

H
ERMANUS MARKET.

I wear a fake smile for Buyu and Hunter and the tourists. One gay guy from Berlin takes all my geckos for the walls of his Thai restaurant. Buyu jives and
yahoos
.

I ought to feel jazzed but I feel low and blue. I feel burdened by all the pain and injustice and sorrow that lingers below the mundane surface of things in this land.

I mosey over to the seafront for an ice-cream but the pink ice-cream van’s gone. Instead I lie down flat on a rock in front of the Marine Hotel from where I can see the tidal pool far below. I want to zone out on the whizzing of grasshoppers and the hiss of the sea but am joggled by voices and hooting and a miasma of smoked fish and dust and dog dirt.

The spell Lotte cast over this town for me has worn off. The whales have gone. The sun glares down, fading colour out and warping things. Fish mysteriously float gut-up to the surface of the lagoon. A bloom of jellyfish plagues the bay. I catch a snatch of Buffalo Springfield (a line about a man and a gun) from a radio.

I’ve plucked angels and jinns from my guitar. I’ve fingered her nipples as fondly as an old man fingers rosary beads. I’ve followed the fringes of her angel feathers down to the foot of her spine, where they almost touch. I’ve murmured words into her ear till she arced her spine and rubbed her breasts against my ribs. I’ve felt her fingernails cut into my skin. I’ve cajoled a primal yell from between her teeth as her hips thrummed under me. And, in my midsummer folly, I thought I’d wooed her. But she’ll not jilt him for me.

A lone, clown-bald hunchback on a bench blows his
vuvuzela
in monotoned farts. And between toots he forecasts a red tide.

I fling a stone at a lizard basking on a rock. It vanishes, just as I too will vanish. These rocks, this tidal pool, the old harbour wall, they will all survive long after my fleeting stay.

At noon I hand the stall over to Buyu. I’m proving to be as unfocused at trading as I was at studying.

On the way to the flat I stand and stare down at the old harbour far below. I feel a sweet vertiginous horror at the thought of my bones cracking on the cruel rocks. Just a step forward would end this fanciful dream of surviving as a poet in a world so ruthless and literal, would cure this ill-spent longing for Lotte. I wonder what makes me not jump. Some tenuous, muslin skin of sanity perhaps.

I step away from the taunting void and walk on.

I see a bare-scalped Xhosa girl alone at the tap, shifting a deep drum of water from knee to hip to shoulder. I give her a hand to put it on her head.

She mouths two shy syllables that sound like
O sir
to my ear but may be a word in her language.

She goes so lightly under her burden. Each lifting of a heel an
O
, each fall of bare-skinned sole a sighing, slurring
sir
in the dust of the churchyard.

I wonder how many miles she’ll walk under her burden. I wonder if a boy has loved her yet.

Suddenly I feel ashamed of falling so foolishly into sorrow and gloom when there is such beauty in the world and folk will risk all to live longer under the sun.

I ride my Vespa out on the Maanskynbaai road again, past the lagoon where dead fish glint and a puzzled fish eagle calls from the bare white bones of a tree jutting out of the shallows, past where I wiped out and where a faded red bus dreams of London, past an obsidian-skinned whore in a curt skirt under a pink umbrella, past the road to the brewery, past a shabby ostrich, all the way out to Gansbaai till black, kelpy vines snake out of white dunes. The stringy survivors of a veld fire.

That girl lingers on in the stinging song of cicadas. Red lips beckoning from under a pink half-moon. She’s proof of how radically things have changed in South Africa since Mandela was freed. Then sin and lack were well hidden and whores sold skin in dim alleys by the dockyards. Now good-time girls flag you down at noon from the dunes out Muizenberg way. Then you had to go out to the airport to see the poor in their cartoon shanties. Now you find tents under downtown flyovers, shacks on the slopes above Hout Bay. And now you hear gunshots at night.

Mandela did work his genie magic. For a time you had euphoria and the high-fiving, folk mixing it up and jiving. And all money is no longer in white hands. And there’s no roof on how far you can go. No law to hobble you if you are born black or coloured. Yet, despite his magic, the ghosts of the past just won’t fade out. And for a lot of shanty-town folk
freedom
is just a word, as hazy as
irony
. For such folk zilch has changed. Other than the colour of their
chief
. That’s what’s so ironic.

The place is stark and wind-scoured. Just a scattering of houses by the slipway. A few joints licensed to cage-dive. A bar or two, like a set in a cowboy film. The Freelander’s parked in front of a makeshift warehouse. Wind whistles off the sea. Gulls see-saw on the keels of upturned boats. Otherwise lifeless. Not a dog in sight.

Inside the ill-lit joint they got a bar and a bicycle shop and a blonde flicking through a magazine. Bicycle frames hang like skeletons from dangling wires. A beautiful Breezer catches my eye. On a flat TV over the bar: a video of slick, silvery sharks gliding languidly by. I imagine the video was shot from a cage. It’s as if I am looking into a fish tank with the great whites reduced to the scale of reef sharks.

An old black guy’s spinning the wheel of an upended bicycle to fine-tune the spokes till the wheel runs true. He’s singing a Xhosa song riddled with recurring
clicks
and
pops
, his tongue clicking in the hollow of his cheeks as if he’s cajoling a lazy donkey.

The girl licks a fingertip now and then, before flicking over another page. Her eyes hover on a photo of a naked ginger-haired girl riding a white horse along a beach.

– You like her? she says without glancing up at me.

I want to say: I like just one girl. I like every fish-belly-pale inch of her. I love her wings and her way of luring birds. And if I can’t have her I’ll pine for her forever.

– She’s pretty, I say.

– Here. You can have her.

She tears the pic out of the magazine and hands it to me, then goes on flicking through static worlds. I fold it up and put it in my pocket.

– You never saw girls naked in the old
SA
, hey?

For me as a boy in Amsterdam this was old hat. One time my mother found a girly magazine in my desk drawer. Instead of scolding me she took a pen and drew an eyepatch over a girl’s left eye and put it back. She could have drawn stars over her nipples but she inked out an eye instead. I knew it was her because she had a photo of that Jew warrior Dayan and his trademark eyepatch that she’d torn out of a newspaper years before. Dayan was a hero to her just as Bono was to me. It puzzled me, what she’d done. And yet I was too ashamed to ever ask why. Years later at school in Cape Town a hockey ball split the skin along my cheekbone. I drew a line with a red
Koki
on the face of one of her gnomes to mimic my wound. Perhaps by then, with my sister dead, she was too far gone to see what a random red line had to do with an eyepatch.

I just nod. Zero told me so. Not white girls. Just
potent
(his word), beaded Zulu tits on postcards from Durban.

– You want to go down? she says without looking up from her magazine.

I imagine she has cage-diving in mind.

– I’m scared.

She laughs and now checks me out from foot to head, eyes lingering midway.

– You’re in the cage. They can’t bite you. And if they did the men got guns.

Cool. And no doubt they’d be happy to shoot a random, cocky coloured out to
sabo
their gig.

– I’m glad you told me that.

–
Ja
.

She hands me a flyer full of shots of gaping-jawed sharks. Their eyes are glazed with that distant, ashamed look dogs get when you catch them peeing.

– That’s a lot of money. Is it cheaper for locals?

– How local?

I’m on the verge of telling her Hermanus but am keen to keep gun-toting men off my ass.

– Cape Town.

– Maybe I can let you go for this.

She pencils a figure on paper.

– That’s still I lot. I’m a student.

I fiddle out my
UCT
student card from among the notes earned from hawking geckos. Still valid till the end of 2004.

– It’s not cheap but you’d never forget it, hey? And in case you did, we shoot a video.

– You going out again today?

– We go out just once a day. Unless the sea’s too wild.

– And you always see sharks?

–
Ja
. But if you don’t, you can catch a free ride the day after.

– Aha.

– Sting did it.

– He went out on your boat?

– No. Another boat. But I saw him.

For a moment she looks downcast. Perhaps at the thought she had not hooked a film star and might forever be stranded in this end-of-the-line place.

– And if Sting goes out to sea you just got to pull a shark out of the hat, hey?

I nod. If ever there was a given, this is it.

– Catch is, sharks get lazy being chucked sardine chum all the time. It’s like they’re dazed.

– But don’t they hunt seals for blubber?