Mr Not Quite Good Enough (7 page)

Ozee came back and Stunki wiped his eyes quickly, jumping to his feet to give Ozee his seat back.

“Okay, I gotta go. Got a nice sweetie waiting for me out front. Later, Ozee,” Stunki said. Then he turned to Gorata. “You take care of my boy, you hear?”

They watched Stunki push through the crowd. “What was that about?” Ozee asked.

“You've certainly got that guy on your side if push ever comes to a serious shove,” Gorata said.

“Yeah, well, we've been friends since we were kids, like you and Kelebogile. That kind of history means something. We've been there for each other.”

Gorata wondered how Ozee knew about Kelebogile. There had apparently been conversations between the two of them when she was not around. She reminded herself to quiz her friend later.

“So what are you about anyway?” Ozee asked, turning towards her and looking her in the eyes.

Gorata wanted to look away but knew it would be cowardly, and she didn't want him to think she was a coward. She wanted him to respect her. But the bare honesty she saw in his eyes scared her.

Who was brave enough to show the world everything? Was this man?

“What do you mean?” Gorata said, trying to buy time.

“I mean, you move around with all of these big men but you don't love them – anyone can see that. What's that about? What are you doing?”

Gorata gave in. If he wanted the truth, he was going to get it. “I'm stumbling around and making mistakes, you're right. But I'm just trying to find the right man for me. I know there are women who don't care about that, but I'm not one of them. I want a husband and I want kids, not just my career. I want everything.”

“Ambitious, huh?” Ozee said with a gentle smile, and she knew he wasn't mocking her.

“Yes,” answered Gorata. “I'm looking for my Mr Right, just like you said the other night. From where you stand, it probably looks pretty chaotic, but that's all I'm doing. This girl is just trying to find the right boy for her, and sadly, she's not doing such a good job of it.”

Gorata looked down at the grass and suddenly felt very sad. It was true, she
was
failing. Maybe she'd never find the right man. Did everyone give up their dream in the end? Would she end up marrying just anyone, hoping it would work out? Was that why marriages failed so quickly? Was that why so many women were either stuck in loveless marriages or getting divorced?

Maybe it was all a lie anyway; maybe there was no Mr Right. Maybe it was time Gorata just accepted the inevitable – either to search forever or settle for second best.

Ozee lay back against the steps so that he could look at her, then he sat up straight and took her face in his hands. “The problem with you is that you don't know what you're looking for. You think you do, but you don't.”

Then he pulled her face to his and kissed her. He was not one for half measures, she could tell. He kissed her as if today was the end of days, as if they would never see each other again, as if he'd been waiting his whole life for this kiss only.

After what felt like forever, Ozee leaned back and Gorata tried to get a breath and calm her heart. She'd never been kissed like this before, with so much passion and urgency. Her body raced inside and she wanted to pull him back to her, she wanted to sneak him into the house, into her room.

She was just leaning forward to kiss him again when someone came up to them.

“Hey, I've been looking all over for you.”

Gorata looked up and there was Alfred. What was he doing here? She hadn't seen him since their disastrous date months ago.

“Please, can we talk? It's urgent. Please,” he said.

He looked dishevelled and uncomfortable. He certainly wasn't used to the kind of crowd Mmandu had gathered together in the garden. He didn't even notice Gorata was with someone else. He was upset and awkward, out of his element.

Ozee stood up and moved to the side. “I'll talk to you later,” was all he said to Gorata, then he disappeared into the crowd.

How could he just leave after a kiss like that, a kiss that opened a whole new world for her? Gorata wanted to go after him, but Alfred sat down next to her and took her arm.

“I've been thinking about us. I'd like us to get back together.”

Gorata heard Alfred speak but didn't take in anything. All she wanted was to get to Ozee. But it was as if she were frozen, stuck in a place she didn't like, longing to get to the man she needed.

Alfred pulled her close and tried to kiss her on the lips Ozee had just kissed. Gorata turned her cheek. She couldn't allow such a desecration of something so important, so sacred.

But Alfred wasn't put off. He persisted.

“I thought we were taking a break. Why did you come here?” Gorata asked, annoyed.

“I don't know. I just kept thinking about you. I realised I liked you much more than I thought I did. I love you.”

Gorata was angry. Why did men assume that women would just be waiting for them?

She was about to tell Alfred to bugger off when he fell to one knee. He pulled a small box from his pocket and opened it to reveal the largest diamond ring she had ever seen. “Will you marry me, Gorata?”

She looked around to see if anyone had noticed Alfred kneeling in front of her. Fortunately everyone was partying, but then she saw Ozee. He stood at the far end of the garden, yet she could see he was looking directly at her.

“Alfred . . . this is so sudden . . . We broke up . . .”

“I know, I know. I was stupid.” Alfred stood up, taking a handkerchief out of his pocket to dust his trousers before removing the ring from its box and placing it on Gorata's finger. “You just keep this. Get used to it. When you've thought about it for a while, you can give me your answer. I know it's all very sudden.”

Before Gorata could say anything or give Alfred the ring back, he disappeared into the crowd.

She sat back against the stoep. The ring sitting heavy on her finger, the proposal forgotten. The party raged on around her, but everything was quiet in her head. All she could feel was Ozee's kiss still echoing through her body.

7

Gorata laid the Sunday paper down in front of her and took a sip of her coffee. It had been a long, long week. The Monday night party seemed years ago.

Work was empty without Amita. Even if every night she called Gorata and told her all about her day, that wasn't the same as being together at the office.

Though Gorata had been stopping at the petrol station every day, Ozee was never around. Alfred, on the other hand, was everywhere. At work with a dozen roses, at home with groceries for a month. He was doing everything in his power to get Gorata back, but she felt tired. Bone-weary tired.

“Good morning,” Kelebogile said.

Gorata answered lethargically as she paged through the paper.

“Good morning,” a deeper male voice said. Gorata's head shot up and she saw Mark following Kelebogile to the coffee machine.

“Oh . . .” Gorata said, knocked out of kilter. “I . . . didn't know . . . you were here.”

He was downing a cup of coffee. “Actually I'm just leaving. We have a talk at the church down the road.” He finished the coffee, rinsed the cup and gave Kelebogile a kiss.

Just then Mmandu came bursting through the door. “Are you ready, lekgowa la mé?”

“Where are you off to?” Gorata asked her sister.

“Church. Mark and I are going. He's going to talk about Aids, and I'm going to get some words from God.” Mmandu repositioned her red-and-blue striped doek and her yellow shawl. “Let's go, we'll be late. You two, don't cook lunch. I've got it all going nicely outside in the pots.”

Mmandu grabbed Mark's hand and dragged him out of the door. “See you later, Kele!” he shouted weakly from outside.

Kelebogile stole some pages of the paper and sat down opposite Gorata with her coffee. “Is Amita coming?” she asked casually.

“What's going on? Did he spend the night?” Gorata asked, ignoring Kelebogile's question. She could see Kelebogile was trying to act like having a man sleep over with her was the most normal thing in the world – but it wasn't, it was unheard of. Gorata was surprised the earth hadn't stopped on its axis.

Kelebogile's answer was just above a whisper. “Yes.”

“So it's like that then?” Gorata asked.

“Yes . . . I really like him. I like him a lot. More than anyone ever.”

Gorata smiled. “You mean you love him?”

“Yes,” Kelebogile said tentatively, and then a bit louder, “Yes, I love him. I can't believe it. I never thought I was made for all of this.”

Gorata could see tears in her best friend's eyes and she rushed around the table to take Kelebogile in her arms. “Why? Why would you not be made for love?”

“I don't know. You know how men are here. They want curvy, sexy women, women like you, not some tiny, flat-chested tomboy like me.”

“Oh, Kele! Don't say that! If they're so stupid to pass you up, it serves them right that Mark came all the way from America to snatch you up from under their stupid noses,” Gorata said. “I'm so happy for you two. He's great.”

Just then someone shouted from the sitting room. “Hello! Anyone home?”

Amita came around the corner, looking just like her normal self, not like someone from TV who didn't want to be friends with them any more. Gorata gave her a hug and suddenly the long, lonely week she'd suffered through vanished. She was here with her girls and everything was good.

“So what did you bring?” Gorata noticed a fancy cardboard box, which she recognised as being from the German bakery across town.

Amita lifted the lid to show a luscious pile of chocolate éclairs. The three friends screamed in delight and Kelebogile jumped up to get coffee for Amita. “I'm famished,” she said after putting the coffee down, and promptly dug into the box for a huge éclair.

“I bet you are,” Gorata teased. “The quiet types are always the wild ones.”

Amita looked around, confused. “What's going on here?”

Gorata quickly let her in on the news and Amita joked, “I saw Mark doing that Tsonga love dance the other night at Joanne's birthday party. He wasn't half bad. You know what they say . . . If they can dance, they're also good at the horizontal shuffle.”

“Stop it, you two!” Kelebogile exclaimed and then changed the subject. “So has Patient Two alias Shawna woken from her coma yet?”

“No,” Amita said sadly. “I'm wondering if she ever will. Maybe I left the day job too soon.”

“Well, Mr Pilane would have you back in a heartbeat. He's been awful since you left,” Gorata said while paging through the paper again.

“I saw the script for next week. Karabo at least wakes up from
her
coma and, of course, has amnesia. I can only hope Shawna follows suit. I haven't even moved, let alone spoken a word, and this is my first acting credit. They could have used a dressmaker's dummy for all the acting I've done.” Amita bit into her éclair as if she was attacking it.

“There must be a reason they didn't wake her up yet. I'm sure Shawna will come round soon,” Kelebogile said. “They can't just continue to pay you for lying around in bed.”

“Ah shame man,” Gorata said, reading the paper.

“Ah shame man, what?” Amita asked.

“Did you read
Batho Ba Mzansi
?”

“No, tell us,” Kelebogile said, moving around with the coffee pot and filling everyone's mugs.

“You know, I must cut this out for Ozee. It will really help him with this issue of his brother,” Gorata said.

“Why?” Amita asked, getting impatient. “Read it to us.”

“Okay, here goes.” Gorata didn't mind reading Bra Kee's wise words again:

We all know him. He's our neighbour, he's our cousin, he's our father or our brother. He's the guy who takes the easy way.

He's the guy who is ruining our beautiful country, but when you point that out to him, he's got all sorts of excuses. He is “redistributing the wealth” or he is “implementing affirmative action” or he is “just trying to feed his family”.

But that's not it. He is a thief. He is trying to take the easy route to wealth. And most of us just sit by and watch. We sit by, and he is killing us.

One great man said that bad things happen when good people do nothing. Batho ba Mzansi, it is time you step up. You can't sit by and let crime go on, no matter who is the perpetrator.

Talk to them, advise them, help them to get out of it – and if you have to, call the police on them. Because I can assure you, ma-chinas, there are only two endings to this story: your loved one will either go to prison forever or he'll turn up dead.

Take action. Now.

Peace out – Bra Kee

“Quite a mouthful, huh,” Gorata said. “He's telling the truth, like always.”

“Yeah,” replied Kelebogile. “We know these thugs but we do nothing, since they're robbing other people. Some of us even buy the stolen stuff from them, thinking we're not wrong because we didn't steal it ourselves. We're just as guilty.”

Gorata took the scissors from the kitchen drawer and cut out the column. She dropped it in her purse but wondered when she would see Ozee again. No one at the petrol station seemed to know where he'd gone. She had tried his cell number and either it was off or he wasn't taking her calls. How do you kiss someone like that and then disappear forever?

She guessed Alfred was part of the problem. Him showing up in his R4 000 suit couldn't have made Ozee feel very good. She felt awful when she saw Ozee across the garden, looking at Alfred on his knees proposing to her with that huge ring.

Maybe Ozee thought she said yes and that it was over between them before it had even started. Maybe that was why he wasn't answering her calls, why he had disappeared.

Ozee probably thought she said yes to Alfred's big diamond ring. But Gorata was realising now that none of that mattered really. The job, the stuff, she didn't care about any of that. If there was love, real love between two people, it shouldn't matter what job they did or how much money they had. She knew that now.

She needed to find Ozee and let him know she knew it now too.

* * *

Monday morning, and the same old traffic to contend with. Minibus taxis diving and ducking. Horns hooting, tyres squealing.

Kelebogile had slept over at Mark's place, so Gorata was alone in the car. She was early, since she didn't need to pass by her friend's school, so she took the next turn to make a stop at the petrol station to see if Ozee had shown up yet, even though it was out of her way and involved a significant amount of backtracking.

She'd passed there twice on Sunday, but never found him. It was as if he'd dropped off the face of the earth. She wondered if she'd ever find him again.

Her mind kept drifting back to the night they were alone in her garden, under the moonlight with all of its promise. Thinking back about everything, she realised that was the moment when she knew Ozee was someone very special. There was a connection between them, something she'd never felt with anyone else before. An honest connection, a strong one.

But now she had let him disappear without telling him the truth about how she felt. She wondered if she'd ever get another chance with him.

She pulled into the station and was relieved when she spotted Ozee talking to some of the petrol attendants near the shop. He saw her and came up to the car.

“Morning, Lady Gorata,” he said, but not in his normal cheerful voice. Today he seemed depressed.

Gorata parked the car and got out. “Hi, Ozee. Do you think we could go somewhere to talk?”

“Sure, let's go for a walk.” He shouted back at the other guys, “I'll be back soon!”

They walked to the park down the road. It wasn't a storybook park with jolly yellow rocking horses, green grass and a rainbow-coloured merry-go-round. This was still Soweto. It had a tall, wobbly slide kids could go down if they didn't mind falling onto the bare dirt at the bottom. There was a swing set with chains hanging and bits of broken seats that had waited so long for the fix-it man that they had forgotten their original purpose.

The greater part of the park was taken up by the dusty soccer pitch. A huge jacaranda stood to one side with a rusty metal bench under it; that was where Ozee and Gorata headed.

“So where have you been? I've been looking for you,” Gorata started, suddenly nervous and unsure. She looked down at the ground, littered with purple flowers.

“I had some things to take care of, family things.” Ozee was being closed and distant. He sat well away from her. Gorata felt an invisible wall between them that she didn't know how to get around.

“What's going on here?” Gorata asked, pointing at the space between them on the bench.

“Come on, Gorata, we both know the score, right? You need someone I'm not. A petrol attendant just won't cut it for you, and I'm not willing to change to become someone I'm not. Love is about acceptance. You need to want me, just like this, and we both know that's never going to happen. You said it yourself. I need to do something more significant with my life. That's a judgement. I can't live with that sort of thing. I can't change for you. That's not how it works. I would never ask you to change for me.”

Gorata had never seen him like this before: so down, so negative. “Are you okay? How's your brother?” she asked, trying to find the source of his mood.

“I'm fine. He's fine, I guess.” Ozee looked out over the soccer pitch. His voice became soft and he disappeared inside himself to the memories held there. “You know, when we were kids, Morake, my brother, used to follow me everywhere. I'm ten years older than him and he idolised me. We used to play for a local soccer team, me and Stunki and a few other guys, and Morake would come for every practice, every game.

“He'd take care of the water and he'd be so serious about his job, as if the whole world depended on him getting it right. He was the sweetest kid ever. I just don't know what happened.” Ozee wiped his hand across his eyes before turning back to Gorata, but she'd seen the tears. She knew how much his brother was hurting him. “He's gone missing. He got out of the hospital and just disappeared.”

“What do you mean disappeared?”

“Stunki talked to some guys from the gang he's been running with. They told him the boss said Morake was too hot right now since he'd been shot. He sent him to Cape Town; those thugs have branches all over. That's where I've been – in Cape Town, looking for him.”

“Did you find him?” Gorata asked, taking Ozee's hand in hers.

“Eventually, yeah, I did. He didn't want me to, though. That's why I was gone so long – he kept dodging me. He knows what he promised me in the hospital, what he promised my mother. He knows he let us down by putting the gang's wishes above ours.”

“So what happened? Did you bring him back?”

“No . . . He's Mr Big Man down there. Suddenly he's got no time for me and doesn't give a shit about our mother whose heart is breaking. I could have killed him, I was so angry. I honestly could have killed him.” Ozee shook his head, trying to get rid of the emotions he was struggling to control.

Gorata took him in her arms though he tried to stop her, but once there, he held her tightly.

“I lied to my mother,” he said into her shoulder.

Gorata pulled back slightly. “Lied? About what?”

“I told her I never found him. She wouldn't be able to accept that he just didn't want to come home to us. He told me he had a new family, one that respected his choices. Can you believe that?”

Gorata shook her head. No, she couldn't. She felt angry at this young man she'd never met. She was angry that he was upsetting Ozee so much.

“I told him if he ever comes to Joburg, if he ever tries to visit us, he better be clear of that gang or I'll be calling the cops on him. I'd rather have him alive in jail than shot dead on the street.”