Karoo Boy (4 page)

A pink Chevy has skydived into the roof of the Hard Rock. We weave through empty chairs and the upbeat vibe of
Pretty Flamingo
. The song is on one of my father’s sixties mixes. Marilyn’s skirt flicks up in a whisk of wind, the way skirts do when the southeaster gusts down Adderley Street.

The balcony is full but two girls shift up. One shades a strawberry milkshake under spinnaker breasts. The freckled skin of the other girl is peeling on her shoulders. She pinches away a film of skin and chews it as we sit down.

Skin orders a Castle Lager. I go for a Coke float: two scoops of vanilla in a glass of Coca-Cola. The fizz makes the ice-cream froth like dirty sea foam.

Pretty Flamingo
fades out and I instinctively wait for Cliff Richard to sing
Living Doll
, the way he does on my father’s mix. But the hippy grooves of
San Francisco
flow instead.

– When you go to San Franciscooo, Skin croons along.

The girls giggle at him, but he does not hear them.

– Ah, this revives my student days in London, goes Skin, squeezing his eyes shut and shaking his head as if he is hurting.

Words bubble up from his lips: Portobello, Soho, Lola, aah.

The spinnaker girl glances at the peeling girl and her breasts jelly up and down.

Again I recall the day on the river in London.

In a tearoom, afterwards, a gypsy woman hovers at our table. Mister, you are blessed, her voice quivers. You have beautiful boys. Spend a pound for a cursed soul. My father glances around, sees we are being stared at, and digs in his pocket. He finds 50 pence. She palms it, bows and goes.

Then my Coke float lands and I have to twist the glass and lick, twist and lick to catch the vanilla froth overflow.

Skin tilts the glass as he pours, in the way my father does, so the beer does not foam.

– In London, he tells me, they tilt the glass so you fill the pint to the brim with unfoamed lager. In Paris they skim off the head of foam. But in Berlin they pour beer so that it foams up. It takes seven minutes to pour a good beer in Germany and if they pour it faster you can send it back.

– Like corked wine?

– Just like corked wine, smiles Skin.

As I pee into a bowl of blue balls, James Dean looks down at me. He wears a red jacket and dangles a cigarette from his lips.

I zip up and run a tap. I flick up my hair with wet fingers, check myself out in the mirror. I find a train ticket in my pocket and roll it into a cigarette. I reckon I look just like James Dean.

The door swings open and Skin comes in. He takes in the whole scene at a glance and smiles.

My cheeks burn because I am caught out and because he so casually unzips his fly in front of me, as if to say: Hey, we are all men. You, me and Jimmy Dee.

I look away as his jet of pee makes the blue balls do a popcorn dance.

Cawing seagulls loop in the sky above the balcony, hoping we will chuck bread or chips for them to catch in their orange beaks dipped in black ink.

– My sister died when the Berg River came down in flood, Skin tells me. The canoe capsized. I made it ashore but the river took her. They reckon she would have bobbed up sometime and floated downriver to the crayfish and sharks at Saldanha.

– I’m sorry, I mumble.

I look out towards Robben Island to avoid his eyes.

– I find it hard to recall her face, he says as he sips his Castle.

But my brother will not fade in time. There is a filmy echo of his face in my Coca-Cola glass. I do not see him in a mirror, for the dead shy away from being caged in a mirror. My brother visits me in reflections with broken edges.

– It may be hard for you to imagine this, Douglas, but the hurt dulls in time.

He rests a hand on my head. Robben Island goes all Dali on me as I blink back tears.

The washerman waits shirtless in the evening breeze for his two rand.

– Go well, chief, says the washerman, bowing his head.

Skin does not appear to hear. He spits into his handkerchief to wipe away a smear of birdshit.

The washerman winks at me as we go.

We ride the coastal road through Clifton and Camps Bay, where in bygone days my mother and father would picnic in the moonlight under the palms. By the time we climb Chapman’s Peak the sky is stained black and the lights of Hout Bay below are yellow seeds scattered by the gods. You can smell the sweet mountain fynbos. We curve ever higher into the night sky. The horizon is a deep orange, as if a fire burns out there where dolphins whine like dreaming dogs.

The feet of a sandpiper flit across my forehead. The feeling is so beautiful I dare not peek and end the magic. So I float on, blindly, craving another feathery touch on my skin. The hood of the Peugeot is still down and the sea wind gooses my skin.

I hear the whistle of a train. My eyelids part. Skin’s face hovers over me, silhouetted by the moon. Daunted by my peeled eyes, his fingers flutter away. The train halts at Muizenberg station, just above the deserted parking lot, where we sit side by side in the Peugeot under the moon.

It saddens me, his fingers fumbling for his cigarettes in the cubbyhole. I want his fingers to comb through my hair, the way my father’s did, but he is tapping a box of Texan cigarettes to pop one up.

An old man drops down from the train onto doddery feet. Then a posse of rowdy boys jumps out. They shadow the old man.

– Hey oupa, off to the disco? they taunt.

He says something about having fought in the war and they caw raucously. He shuffles across the tracks, shaking his head. The boys swing down towards us. The Rolling Stones warp out of a boombox radio.

One of the boys, his jeans slit in gaping gashes below his ass, picks up a Coca-Cola can and chucks it at a woman in a yellow bikini on a palm-fringed, billboard beach. Black tears of Coca-Cola run down her breasts and stomach. When the tears reach her bikini bottom the boy licks them away. The others howl like dogs at the moon.

The boys go down to the sand and crack open cans of beer from a backpack. Laughter and jigsaw words carry over Jagger’s jaggedy voice and the hiss of the surf:

tits

shark

Tutu

Yoko Ono

cunt

– Your eyes are a beautiful blue, Skin whispers into his hands, cupped to light a Texan.

For a moment I wonder if I heard it. But the sentence lies among the jigsaw words and Stones lyrics, almost as physical as the box of Texans he flicks onto the dashboard.

He tilts his head up to drag deep on the cigarette, but does not look at me. His eyes focus on the rearview mirror before resting his hand on my hip. It is the same instinctive glance to the back seat my father always gave before his hand went to my mother’s lap. I know I ought to feel dirtied, but I feel numb. This is the beach my brother died on and it is as distant to me as the billboard beach.

I wish I had not opened my eyes, then maybe the boom-box boys would not have come and Skin would not have said the words that cannot be unsaid.

– I want to go home, I tell him.

He nods and turns the key. The Peugeot motor purrs under the bonnet. As we pull away, a voice hurls the words: fucking homos, at us. The others hoot with laughter.

– Bloody country, Skin swears through clenched teeth.

For a while he is silent. I watch his cheek bone rippling under taut skin. As we steer into Lagoon Road, he turns to me.

– I’m sorry our evening ended so sordidly.

I am not sure if he means the taunting of the boombox boys or his touching me. The Peugeot glides to a standstill under the coral tree and putters out. The front room flares up and I see my mother at the window, beyond the frangipani flowering white in the moonlight. Skin jumps out to open my door, as if I am a girl. He shakes my hand, ruffles my hair and flashes a smile at my mother. He is Gatsby, all charm.

– See you tomorrow, he calls as he skips around to his side.

He reaches for the dial and jazz fizzes up to the moon.

B
ESSIE MALAN NEXT DOOR
has a glass eye. It is blue. An ostrich pecked her eye out up in Oudtshoorn. The ostrich thought the eye was a gemstone, or a button. When an ostrich goes for you, the thing to do, my father used to tell Marsden and me, is wave a thorn branch at it. Bessie did not have time to wave a thorn branch.

Bessie Malan’s white hair is a tangled crow’s nest of fishing gut. Her glass eye she puts on a pine stump in the yard to keep an eye on the gardenboy, Matches.

At dusk Bessie Malan comes out with an enamel mug of coffee for Matches and pops the eye back in.

– Yo yo yo, says Matches, as he jives out the gate. He has traded his gumboots for the black-and-white alcapones he wears to joll around town.

A hoopoe has his digs in the dead pine stump.

– Tannie Malan, aren’t you scared the hoopoe will fly away with your eye in its beak? I ask, as Matches’s alcapones tap a jiggedy beat down the tar, glad to escape the mad madam and her voodoo eye.

– Blitz never hits the same bliksem twice, says Bessie Malan, sucking in her lips.

Her teeth lurk somewhere in the murk of her house. I wonder if she ever goes out with all her parts in.

Hope says the marble-eyed widow smokes dagga for the pain in her crooked bones. I am not sure, as I have never heard of whites smoking it. But the way Hope tells it, dagga grows like pumpkins in the Transkei. She says you can smell the sweet tang of it in the townships, through the biting stink of gum burning in steel drums.

One night Bessie Malan jumped from the footbridge into the lagoon and sunk to the beer-bottled sand. A vagabond abandoned a bicycle festooned with his belongings to dive in and save her.

Hope reckons her head was so stoked with dagga she thought she could fly.

– I don’t want you filling the boy’s head with stories of dagga and skollies, my mother scolds Hope, stabbing at a canvas with her paintbrush the way she stabs the jammed lid of a jar of jam to pop the trapped air.

My mother does not look up as I go out. I walk along the lagoon and cross the footbridge Bessie Malan flew from. A bony bird flapping featherless wings. Fishing-gut hair floating on the tide.

In Beach Road I cross at the zebra by the public pool. I stand at the railings, looking down on the pool. Beside me is a black man with his boy up on his shoulders. I recall my Dad holding me up to see the banjos and umbrellas in the Coon Carnival of clowned lips and pink umbrellas and music oozing sweetwine sunshine.

I wonder what the black man tells his boy, who is forbidden by law to swim in this water.

– Ishushu namhlanje, the man says to me, mopping his brow.

– Ewe, ishushu, I nod.

Then I see Marta by the pool in a bikini and my heart goes rikkitikkitavi.

I fish out the screwed-up rand note to pay the woman at the gate to the pool. She folds it out flat with long fingers, as if handling a dirty handkerchief.

On the Kalk Bay harbour wall, as Marsden’s ashes sink, Oom Jan slips a ten rand note into my hand, as if it is my birthday. My mother holds my other hand, and beside her stands my father, head bent down towards the water where gulls dive to taste the floating orange and yellow nasturtium flowers.

She holds Oom Jan’s note up to the sun for the watermark, then she glares at me, as if to say: I know you young men and your tricks. Pool and cinema women are always bitter and wary. They would be doubly wary when Marsden and I stood side by side, as if our mirrored looks were a joke we wanted to play on them.

Marta lies on her stomach on a sarong on the grass by the side of the pool. Her watermelon-motif bikini is unhooked for tanning. Her ginger hair has escaped the pink rubber bands and spills over the border of her sun-faded sarong onto the grass. A wire runs from a radio to her ear. I can just pick up the bass.

– Hi, Marta.

But my voice does not reach through the music. I am not sure if I should touch her. I stand so my shadow falls over her face. Sensing that the sun is gone, her eyelids peel back and she squints green eyes at me. Her fingers hook up her bikini. I glimpse a sliver of untanned breast. One hand turns the radio down and the other finds her shades.

She rolls over, with the shades hiding her green eyes and the watermelon motif taut over her small breasts.

– Hi, Marta.

– Hi, she says, tentatively.

– It’s me. Douglas. Remember, from the train.

– Oh ya. Howzit?

– Fine.

She shifts up to make space for me on her sarong. I sit on the edge, almost touching her skin.

She rattles a box of Beechies gum at me and I finger one out and chew it. The orange flavour fills my mouth.

I look up to see the black man and his son, still at the railings. I hope he will not see me, but he does, and waves. I wave back, feebly.

– You know I once saw you on the beach, says Marta. I was running with Shadow, my dog. You were walking on the beach with your surfboard. You had undone the leash and it dragged in the sand behind you. Shadow went after it as if it was a rat. He got it in his teeth and ran and jerked the board out of your hands.

She laughs.

– I think it was my brother.

– Oh. Sorry. I heard about your brother.

My eyes lasso a seagull, follow it till it fades in the haze. Then I study Marta’s pierced earlobes. My mother says it is cheap girls who pierce their ears. My mother still wears clip-on earrings. She says the Hindus in Durban may run hooks through their skin, but she will not scar the temple of God.

– How does it feel, to be alone? Having been a twin.

I gaze up at a hang-glider surfing the sky.

– I’m sorry, whispers Marta. You don’t have to tell.

I shrug.

– I still feel as if I am a twin. I still feel as if he sees me, as if he knows my thoughts.

– That’s so mystical, says Marta.

There is a lull between us, as I have not thought of it as mystical, and I want to think it out for a moment. But my eyes focus on her earlobes again. It looks like a fish hook in the skin.

– Did it hurt?

– For a few days. You have to rub rum on the ring and keep twiddling it.