Like it Matters (8 page)

When the load was finished the machine made a noise and I turned the taps off, and soon after she came back into the room. She’d tied her hair up all neatly. I could see she’d been crying. I told her about the cigarette in the washing machine and she just smiled and shrugged her shoulders. The fifty-rand note tore pretty much as soon as I touched it.

We put the clothes in the tumble dryer, and she twisted a dial that started ticking on its way back. She pushed another button and the old thing came to life, loud and sputtering, sounding a bit like a generator. “Okay, just another forty minutes,” she said.

Till what?
I thought.

What happens when the pants are dry and you have to go home, Ed?

In the kitchen, we sat on high chairs and drank tea. I had to be careful with how I crossed my legs and folded the towel if I didn’t want to just sit there with my balls hanging out.

We sat there, and neither of us said a thing. I didn’t mind it, but I didn’t want her to think I was having a bad time or I didn’t want to be around her or anything like that, so I said, “You don’t have like a crossword or a pack of cards or something?”

“Doubt it,” she said.

“Some drugs squirrelled away somewhere?”

She didn’t laugh.

“No,” she said. “I have been trying, actually.”

It looked like she was going to move, or get up or something, so I put my hand on her arm and I said, “Sorry. Me too. I promise, I’ve actually been good. Months now.”

She stared at me for a bit, but then she said, “Do you like photo albums? We’ve got enough of those.”

We went back through to the lounge. It’d got a bit lighter in there, the daylight was pressing against the curtains, leaking in wherever it could. I noticed a little table set up in the corner—an antique thing with a bevelled stand and three claw feet. On the table was a random collection of dusty, pretty things: a pack of Edward Hopper coasters, an evil eye, a quill and a mostly empty bottle of purple ink, a jaw harp, some tarot cards, a small statue of some kind of tree done in iron and wire and precious stones. I was about to pick up the pack of coasters and look through them but then I felt her hand on my arm. Softly, I heard her say, “No, please don’t touch anything.”

She told me to sit on one of the couches and then she went over to a cabinet near the window and unlocked it and opened it up. Dark as it was, I could see that the only things inside the cabinet—a tall thing, with about six or seven shelves—were photo albums. And they weren’t neat in there, they were all over the place. You just knew they were the only things in the room that ever got touched. She grabbed a couple from the top of the cabinet and then she bent down and took one plain white album from a shelf of plain white albums near the bottom. “Want to bring yourself outside?” she said, and headed to the front door.

The way the daylight hit me when I got to the doorway, the way it stung my eyes and put spots in them, made me think of the couple of times in my life I’d hung out in a smokehouse. Both times were at this semi-abandoned place somewhere between Rosebank and Athlone, and all of a sudden—smiling up at a cloud and blinking away the spots, watching her move across the lawn to the oak tree—the comparison made me feel so good, so
proud
, like in the grand scheme things were definitely getting better

Who cares that her dad pantsed you and you’re walking around in a beach towel?

I met her at the tree. The thing was so big it had like four trunks. There was a bench knocked up between two of them and we sat down.

She put one of the albums on her lap. Then she looked past me, sort of over my shoulder, checking out the house, and she put her hand in my hair and kissed me. As rough and ardent as the night before. That was her thing—she kissed like she might never get another one.

I broke it off, saying, “No, maybe don’t.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Well, firstly, your dad would murder me. Or he’d come rushing out with some tea or something to throw in my face. And secondly,” I said, and I looked down at my crotch, “I’m kind of in a towel.” She laughed. “And we’re kind of out on the street here. It’d be a pretty depraved sight.”

She laughed some more. “Okay, then you have to hold my hand.”

“Deal.”

“Do you really want to look at photos?”

“Ja,” I said. “I really do.”

But I got an instantly weird feeling from the photo album. I knew something was very off, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. The first thing I thought, just from the opening pages or whatever, was that her dad, or whoever’d taken most of the photos in there, just couldn’t use a camera for shit. I could barely see what was going on in any of the frames, everyone was blurry. There were some shots that were so overexposed they looked like close-ups of burning lightbulbs. But she kept turning the pages, and then every once in a while she’d stop on a photo, one where you could actually see what the point of it was, and she’d tell me about those ones—

And I got it, I worked it out—

It wasn’t just that he was bad with the camera, what was weird about it was that he must’ve albumed every fucking photo he ever took.

She paged quite quickly through the album, and it was strange but if I glazed my eyes and looked loosely at the pages, it was like I could see it all as a sort of wash—this blurry montage of a kind of life in this country I could imagine pretty well. They spent a lot of time at the beach, they went camping, she had her birthdays at the Wimpy, they traded cars a lot and always looked delighted with the new one, whenever any of them got new clothes the camera came out

And then all of a sudden the fact that most of the photos in there were duds wasn’t a problem anymore, it was part of it—actually, it made it perfect. I was squeezing her hand and I think I wanted to tell her I loved her, I felt protective and nostalgic about this childhood she’d had and I was going to
do
something about it, kiss her or something

But then she said, “Ha, finally. I knew it was this album. Here’s the cat I had for a while.”

“Cool. What’s going on over here?” I said, pointing at one of the pages.

“What’s it look like?”

“Well, it looks like the cat’s wearing a cape.”

“Hey? That was Pumpkin’s cape. I made it.”

“The cat wore a cape?”

“Ja.”

“Shame.”

“Please, man, she loved it. Look at her.”

“What happened to Pumpkin?”

“My mom was allergic. We only had her for a couple of months.”

“That sucks,” I said.

Then, even though I was sure I knew already, I guess I needed to witness it and I asked her, “What’s the deal with the white albums? I saw there was a whole stack of them there in the cupboard.”

“These,” she said, and she brought the white one into her lap, “these were like a project me and my dad did together. Well, mostly it was him, but I helped.”

And obviously it was just pages and pages of portraits of her mom, except this time most of them were good photos, and if it was a really good photo, you’d get twelve of the same one staring back at you from a double-page. She was gorgeous. She had country-singer hair—pulled back and bouffant and dark, almost red, the colour of sun shining through a bottle of Coke

And while Charlotte kept turning the pages, I was fixating on that face, not just because she was beautiful, but because there was something else, something dark there. In every picture, you could see her trying more or less to hide it, but there it was—this interrupted absence, these impatient eyes, almost like she blamed the camera for bringing her back from somewhere far away and so much better.

Then Charlotte turned the page again and there was a spread of dark photos, clean shapes backlit by gold-green light, a silhouette in the middle. It looked like someone praying in an ancient temple, but then I recognised it was the lounge, that was probably the morning sun on the curtains, that was her mom, naked, in these poses that were much more like yoga than porn.

“Woah, sorry,” I said, and I looked away.

She laughed and closed the album.

“That’s okay,” she said. “She took those herself, with a timer. We never knew about them. I’m sure she’s delighted you got a look.”

Before I could stop myself I blurted out, “So she’s gone, hey?”

“She left. A week after I turned nine.”

I didn’t know what to say.

I sort of just gave her my hand, and nodded.

“Mozambique,” she said. “She ran off there with some guy.”

“Wow.”

“Ja. I remember my dad showing me on the map—it was so far away. It felt like she’d died. But then soon after that, I got this idea that one day I’d show up at her door there and we’d live together again, like the first big idea about my life I’d ever had, you know? I don’t think I’ve had another one since.

“And my dad,” she went on, “he wasn’t crazy before all that, I promise. The beard, right? That’s a mourning beard, it started the day she left. The god stuff, that
happened
, that wasn’t just there. And me too. I also wasn’t always like this, Ed. You know what it’s like to be young, and
feel
fucked up? And everyone else wants to get older but you’re going home to your dad and he’s losing the fucking plot right in front of your eyes, and all you can wonder is
how old—
how old till that happens to me?”

Jesus
, I thought.

We’re like the same person.

“Hey, don’t cry,” I said.

She was playing with the bracelet on my wrist. “It’s so sad though.”

“What?”

“
This
, man, these photos, that room in there.
This
, what happened to us when she left.”

“Ja, it is,” I said. “But what’s sadder? For thirteen years of my life, my dad and I didn’t have a photo album in the house. Then one night we had visitors and they made us feel bad about it, so we got one and we got a camera and we went out of town two weekends in a row to try do something that was worth taking pictures of. Then we had to wait two weeks till we could afford to print the film and then when the photos came out, Jesus, we were both so disappointed I don’t think we ever touched the camera or spoke about the album again. Went back to never going anywhere on the weekends.”

“What happened to
your
mom?”

“Charlotte,” I said. “This is the point. The point is I’m not scared of you.”

“What if you should be?”

“I promise,” I said, and just then I felt a bit like crying as well, “me on my own, Charlotte,
that’s
scary. The other night, I couldn’t sleep and you know what I was thinking? I can’t even remember how I got there but I was fucking
begging
fate, god, whatever, fucking begging life to contrive it so I’d catch a bullet that was meant for a child or a nurse or a teacher or something. I’ve been weird, Charlotte. This last little while’s been weird, I’m …” I looked at her square on. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like I need something.”

“If I …”

“Ja?” I said.

Our faces were close together, we were talking softly all of a sudden.

“If I pack a bag, can I come home with you?”

“I’ll get my jeans out the tumble dryer while you’re busy.”

She smiled. “They might still be a bit wet.”

“Ag,” I said, “I can deal with itchy thighs. That’s not a problem.”

She leaned in even closer, put her forehead against mine

Almost whispered to me, “I’ll scratch them for you when we get home, I promise.”

Y
OU SHOULD
’
VE SEEN HER WITH THE CAROUSEL
, she was amazing.

Duade was delighted that she came to work with me. He kept winking at me when she wasn’t looking and giving me thumbs-ups behind her back, and then later, when he saw how good she was at drawing—while I was busy putting some scrawls on the sign so it’d say
MAINTENANCE
instead of
MAINTINANCE
—he sidled over and told me to marry her, no queshtion.

The first time I moved out of Phil’s place, back when I was still fresh in Cape Town, I lived in a house with some people in Pinelands for a while, and one of them was this girl with dread-locks who played guitar and wrote her own songs. But besides her, even though I’d always wanted to, I’d never really hung out much with artists. Closest I got was selling them drugs.

But you just had to watch Charlotte there at the carousel and you knew that’s what she was—she was an artist. She was wearing dungarees and she sat on her haunches in the long grass, you could see the dew creeping up the denim, all the way over her knees, but she had her sketch pad in her lap and her eyes just went between that and the model horse in front of her—

Staring at it like the rest of the world was on mute, and the horse was singing just to her—the softest, most beautiful song.

It only took her a couple of hours to finish all the sketches. She did ten different designs for the twenty horses. She showed me how she’d already planned out what colours they were going to be, and how some of them were going to be patchworks and some were going to have patterns—I had two favourites, this one in cream with handprints and stripes on its legs, like an Indian warhorse, and this other one that was going to be maroon with a turquoise mane and tail, and a big burned-orange sugar skull on its side.