Cruel Crazy Beautiful World (3 page)

An aeroplane hums overhead. Jabulani detours from the path to shinny up an acacia tree.

His heart still beats hard long after the humming of the plane fades out.

Once dark falls he will head further south through this foreign veld pervaded by cackling calls, distant shots and jaggy-tooth things.

H
ERMANUS. MIDAFTERNOON.

The town sulks under a smudged sky, caught between stoic mountains and a grey sea.

Zero spots a half-hidden white pickup up ahead and his foot rides light on the pedal.

– Pigs, Zero spits.

Zero has hated the police since they loaded up the alley-striped, jazz-pervaded world of his boyhood in District Six onto the flatbed of a truck and shifted his family to a matchbox house out on the windswept Cape Flats. He had seen his father go from finger-snapping, nipple-pinching, banjo-strumming charmer to a mumbling ghost within half a year of the bulldozers levelling the jumbled bars and haunts of a jaunty, jiving youth. His father died a muted, bitter death in a randomly wired-off zone out on the dusty Flats.

Me, I am free to come and go despite being half
coloured.
Yet I fear for this land where a blood-lusting
tsotsi
will stab an old man with a flick knife for the pittance in his pocket, where Mbeki (our tea-sipping chief) turns a blind eye to the
loco
antics of Mugabe just over the border, and where Zuma (Mbeki’s second fiddle) is somehow above the law. There are murmurs in the papers of dodgy arms deals and pocketed money. Yet they can’t catch Zuma out. He’s as elusive as a chameleon that shuffles his camo colours at whim.

My old man, however, revels in this loophole-riddled time.

The Benz halts in front of the scuba-diving shop on the seafront road.

The sea scatters foam like white feathers of shot birds.

Along the rocks an old man furtively knifes mussels out of cracks.

A gummy-eyed old hobo herds his reeking, bagged world on a hospital gurney. The gurney’s wheels squeal like cornered rats.

– You happen to have a fag? Or a bob or two? Either will do.

Zero fishes a packet of Camels out of the pocket of his half-mast Dockers. He finds a balled ten-rand note in his pocket. He fingers out two smokes.

The hobo tucks one behind his ear and puts the other between his cracked lips. He fattens out the note, holds it up to squint at the watermark like some wary dealer, then folds it and tucks it behind his hat band.

Zero rummages in the Benz’s cubbyhole for an old Bic lighter and hands it to the hobo.

His fag catches fire, then fades to a glow.

– Ta for the fire.

Now the hobo studies the orange Bic lighter lying in his red-lined, dirt-rimed hand.

– It’s yours, chirps Zero.

The hobo nods ta, and thumbs down the gas to sniff at it.

Zero fetches a can of oil out of the boot. Then he kills that ratty squealing of the gurney.

That’s the thing with my old man. Just when you peg him as an asshole, he off-foots you.

Over the roof of the shop a great white shark gapes its jaw at a dummy in a wetsuit in a diving cage.

Half of Zero’s left calf is gone from the time a shark took him while he was diving for crayfish. He had gone on diving for years after to prove to his mates that he was
no moffie
. Nowadays others dive for him ... for the sacks of crayfish traded in alleyways behind pubs. Another of his sideline capers: purveyor of pirated shellfish.

We lug my guitar and a kit bag (full of bunged-in Levis and rugby jerseys) and banana boxes (full of studied novels with unlined spines, curiously devoid of pencil marks and coffee stains) and Johnnie Walker boxes (full of Zero’s
trading goods
) up a flight of whining steps.

On the landing, while I fiddle with the key, he randomly picks up a book from one of the boxes.

– How the hell can you read a book and not crack the spine? It’s unnatural.

Again I find this ironic, coming from the man who leaves no spoor. I merely shrug as he flicks through the book.

In fact I never annotated my textbooks at university. I never inked my name on the flyleaf. I never took notes in lectures. I just tuned in and remembered. I have that kind of mind. I remember things.

– You think you’re higher than your old man now you’ve read all your books, hey?

He drops the book.

– I tell you, life is too short for highfalutin books with long words.

The door swings open. Light filters through a salt-filmed window into the spartan flat. A smell of dust and flat beer and old record sleeves flows out.

A sagging bed stands on paint-flecked floorboards. A half-blind mirror hovers over a basin. A rickety bentwood chair lurks under a graffitied desk. A blade fan drops a dirty string. A bare bulb dotted with fly shit dangles at the end of a wire.

I flick the switch and the bulb flares, illuminating flecks of mosquito blood on the walls.

Zero tugs the string of the fan. The blades sigh into a blur.

Through the window I see the new harbour a mile away, across the bay.

On a random nail I hang a watercolour my mother once did of a seagull in Kalk Bay harbour. I found the painting folded up in a book long after she burnt the others. Long after she put a diamond ring and all her milky opals in a drawer for good.

Over time my mother traded the company of men for her front-yard gnomes. She loves her gnomes for wanting nothing from her other than the pigeon shit wiped off their glossy red hats. She loves their jolly mouths rimmed in snowy white for being forever amused by her mutterings. They never burp beer fumes at her. Nor do they leer at other women.
Mazel tov
is all they ever say.
Lucky star.
Yet the stars have not been kind to her. In their mouths
mazel tov
is just another way of saying
such is life
.

She can’t bear the way Zero licks his fingers to turn the page when he reads the paper, nor his tacky spinal tattoo of a mango-titted virago, nor his habit of flicking fag stubs into her fuchsias, nor the way he foots her Bengal cat aside. While he’s out cruising after dusk she dozes off in front of her murder mysteries with her cat in her lap, never seeing the killer caught. Or she studies the neat hole left in an avocado by the pip, until it begins to tint sepia. Then she spoons it into her mouth, happy that she no longer has to worry about him smearing her lipstick with whisky-fumed lips.

Phoenix has a theory that my mother’s so hooked on murder mysteries because she gets to vicariously kill Zero over and over again. And that old Zero’s in the dark about this.

Perhaps Zero and my mother are still tenuously twinned in this knack for never being caught red-handed.

All the years I studied at university neither my mother nor her opals were rubbed to draw their fire to the surface. She exudes so stoic and islanded an aura that I seldom hold her, the woman who bears the shimmering scars of my unfurling in her womb. The woman whose milk I sucked and who read
Alice in Wonderland
to me as she tucked me in at night.

I sigh at not having to witness my mother drift ever further into her wordless, wary, gnomic world. Or to catch her again in the dark on grass all blue with fallen jacaranda flowers, lying fat and naked and deathly white, as if raped by the moon.

Though Zero’s a dog, I have to confess there’s something of his eye for girls in me. My heart skips a beat when the southeaster flips up the skirt of a stockinged girl. I too have gawped at the copper hips and jiggling moons of the Loop Street go-go girls. And yet my old man’s lip-licking at the sight of a scant skirt renders me somehow ashamed of being a man.

Am I a man, then? Is a man as scared of the random hop of frogs as I am? Does a man blow
kazoooing
bubbles through a straw in the lees of a mojito? Does a man cry freely during a film? Does a man just let his mother fade out? Does a man bow to his old man’s plan for him instead of heading out into the world to seek his fortune?

I feel like a white-clay boy who has been exiled from his mother’s hut to wander ghost-like through the
bundu
till I become a man. This time now, in this boondocks place, is my
bundu
time. It may not be hard-core
bundu
, I may not have to kill things or dig up roots, but it is nevertheless where I’ll have to learn to survive alone. I’d rather just play my guitar and whimsically pen poems, maybe travel to see the world: Galway, Sienna, Malacca, Saigon, Mandalay. Yet I feel I have to undergo this exile if I am ever to free myself from my old man.

A hidden gecko chirps at this daunting thought.

Zero listlessly plucks a few strings of my guitar. You can hear that the feeling for it is still in his fingers though he hasn’t played his guitar for years, ever since the thing that can never be undone happened.

I fling the window ajar. I look out over the sweep of Walker Bay. I smell a fusion of salt and rotting kelp and seagull guano. Feathery wave froth fuses with white sky.

The world lies under a skin of dust. Sounds warp as if played on a tape left too long in the sun. Wind gusts off the sea, chucking scraps of paper about.

I pick up a flyer advertising pizza.

Two gaunt black dogs hide from the wind in a capsized forty-gallon drum in a corner of the empty market square. They curl floppy pink lips to flash their canines at us.

Zero squints at a flapping map of the market layout to find his bearings.

The dogs eye us through lacklustre eyes.

There is the Burgundy restaurant on the west of the square. The Fisherman’s Cottage pub is behind him, so my stall (he figures out) is to be just in front of this low white wall. Under this kaffir plum, right here.

He folds the map away and Zippos a Camel in the lee of his hand.

I look at the space that is to become my world. The measure of a jail cell. In the shade of this kaffir plum I am to sell bead animals made by wizard-fingered Zimbabweans in Cape Town while fellow refugees hold their place in the never-ending line for asylum papers.

– The bead animals will sell like hotcakes. The good beadwork is done by the Zimbabweans, or the Zulus.

He flicks ash to the wind.

– If you want carvings, that is another thing.

He jabs his fag towards me to underscore his teaching.

Curiously, for one who is neither black nor white, Zero loves to pigeonhole folk.
If you want masks you find a Gambian. If you want a sarong you find a Kenyan. If you want carvings you find a Tanzanian. If you want dope you find a Nigerian who will just happen to know a man who has carted his taboo cargo down from Lesotho’s skylands, Sherpa style.

Zimbabwean beadwork. (On wire. The Zulus do it on string.) That’s the
trading goods
in the Johnnie Walker boxes: tangled, vivid menageries of animals and birds and fish.

– It’ll be a breeze, Zero tunes. Tourists love this indigenous shit.

I would point out to him that the beadwork being Zimbabwean rather than South African renders it rather non-indigenous, but he’d just tune:
Selling shit is all about selling an illusion
. In Zero’s eyes there is no objective truth.

– I hope so. I hope they go down well.

– Like selling grass to a hippie. Whatever you make over cost, you pocket.
Capito
? So haggle hard. Beat folk down.

Zero’s Survival Tip #2. Haggle hard.

He hands me money for a second-hand Vespa he bid for after seeing an advert in the paper. I just need to pick it up from an old, glass-eyed priest who has not ridden the thing since he lost an eye in the township riots of 1976.

As Zero rides away in his empty Benz, he winds down to call offhandedly:

– Hey, Jero. I love you, my
laaitie
.

Then he’s gone. I, his
laaitie
, his boy, feel stranded in the wake of his upbeat bravado. I’m cut off from all that’s defined my life so far, other than a few books. And the tourist trinkets: Zero’s jetsam.

A crow’s wry
faawk
mocks my loneliness.

The light fades. I go to find this pizza joint.

J
UST SOUTH OF THE
Limpopo River. After dusk.

The scattering of stars reminds Jabulani of fishing pontoons at night on Lake Kariba: the way they lure kapenta with a dazzling light.

He drops from the acacia to his feet and runs on in the loping stride of a distance runner.

He has always run. Run the long dusty miles to school as a boy. Run on the track at the university in Harare. Run at dusk for years to calm his mind after another day of teaching and marking papers.

He runs hour after hour in fear of a snake fanging him or a bullet felling him. And as he runs he recalls how he used to put his feet up for a pipe smoke after putting his son and daughter to bed. He’d let the cat doze on his lap and tune into Billie Holiday. It was at such times, as smoke floated up from his pipe through the overhanging fever tree to the Southern Cross, that he tallied up his good luck:

The magic of drifting into dreams as he lay in the dark against Thokozile’s spine.

Tendai coolly hula-hooping at dusk under the papaya, hardly a hint of lackadaisical lilt in her hips. The way she drew butterflies and angels in fluid lines without lifting her pencil from paper. The way she saw him as her hero for carrying her high on his shoulders through the flaring bazaar, for catching moths and spiders in his bare hands, for reading to her in a range of voices.

Panganai finger-picking Bob Marley on his guitar in the hope of dazzling the girls who drifted by. The way he lost himself so deep in a novel he’d not feel mosquitoes stinging him or the cat rubbing her fur against the soles of his feet.

As Jabulani runs on through a dark savannah under a winking sliver of moon, he thinks: Bob Marley had held out such high hopes for this free Zimbabwe. And now Zimbabwe’s gone to the dogs.

One time he has to sidestep a black cow shifting out of shadow.

A monkey-thorn draws a red thread across his forehead.

He hears shots in the distance. The farmers are out hunting.

The shots recall how, years ago, a band of renegade war veterans under a man they called Hitler had
yahooed
through his town in a pickup. They had shot their totemic AK-47s at an invulnerable sun, cut a blue sky to ribbons with their
panga
blades. They had flipped the corpse of a woman from the flatbed of that pickup. Her head had jounced rubberly in the dust. A breast had been
pangaed
off.