You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (18 page)

‘Are you all right?' he asks in English, and takes off his glasses. An empty gesture since his face retains the anonymity that sunglasses so mercifully bestow. I am still not sure whether he recognises me: my hair is no longer straightened, my clothes are carefully chosen from jumble sales and I have a vegetarian diet to thank for my not altogether unbecoming plumpness. An alternative bourgeois, European style. Perhaps my voice.

‘Yes, it's just that . . .' but my legs give way as I withdraw my hand. How has he managed to get my own body to rebel against me in this way? He reclaims my hand.

‘You need water,' and he leads me with the confidence of those acquainted with emergencies to a tap almost hidden by the tarnished orange of tattered cannas.

Someone says, ‘You'd better not. That tap is for the flowers. The old man will let thunder loose on us.'

Upon which a woman with several doekies wrapped around her head produces from under her bundles a gallon can of water.

‘Here,' she says, ‘I fill my can wherever I go. Our water in Moedverloor is salt enough to shrink the innards. Here, have a drink but don't splash. As long as there's no splashing he won't know a thing.'

The can passes round in an infectious thirst. The woman parts the cannas and just turns the tap on when the starched cap of the servant girl pops over the wall.

‘My God,' she exclaims indignantly, ‘your mama won't know you when doctor finishes with you – pulp,' and she pummels and moulds with her hands an imaginary ball of flesh. The woman listens composedly, with cocked head, but does not stop the tap. ‘There,' pointing into the distance, ‘across those blue mountains lies my mama, a box of bones under an antheap,' she says irrelevantly. So that the girl laughs and says, lowering her voice, ‘He'll be here soon. Just doing the last sick white.' The green grapes twitch as she drops behind the wall.

I have found a cushion for my dizzy head in the cleft of bougainvillea branches. I stare at the crushed confetti of mauve blossoms at my feet and note for the first time the tiny yellow trumpets in the centre. I do not realise that I look ridiculous until he draws me out of the shrub.

‘You ought to have a walk,' and he puts his dark glasses back on. Surely he is seeking my death. Exercise seems an unusual remedy for faintness which he thinks I suffer from. But I do not resist. I do not tell this tokolos of a man to piss off. And I find no comfort in the thought of going home to Father and a cup of Rooibos tea.

We stumble along past the butcher's where the man in the white polystyrene hat packs his parcels of meat into the
bicycle basket in readiness for the afternoon delivery. Henry shouts something to him in his language but the man looks puzzled and Henry repeats, enunciating more carefully. Do I imagine his words echoing? The street is so still; only the shopkeepers are left, turning their keys as they retreat from the afternoon heat. The man in the hat smiles and lets loose a volley of grunts and Ewe's so that I assume the exchange to be purely phatic. Just showing off. But I want him to know where my allegiance lies. Shame and vanity produce the words, ‘You speak Zulu?' I keep my voice flat, matter-of-fact.

‘No,' and he waits for the word to take effect before he continues, ‘Xhosa.' His reply induces faintness, an alternating light- and heavy-headedness. I feel the thrill of an adolescent wish coming to pass. How I hoped that I would sink into a faint and be carried along the corridor by the science teacher whose impatience at my stupidity would melt into solicitude. But I was always big, robust; it is unlikely that I will lose consciousness for even one delicious second.

We walk slowly and in silence. Which I break. ‘Where did you learn?'

‘Karasburg,' another pause, ‘Namibia,' as if I would not know.

‘All the way up there?'

‘Yes all the way up there.' He will not be enticed into explaining. Unless it is simply a lie, since Xhosa is not spoken that far north.

We turn into the Main Road lined with dusty trunks of eucalyptus trees. The remote grey-green foliage has forged ahead into cooler regions way above the single-storey buildings. The still midday rays of the sun become molten globules of metal that fall plop into my thick black hair. My
neck bulges under the weight. I reach with my free hand towards the trunk of a tree and he says with a trace of impatience, ‘What's the matter?' I have to hold on to his heavy rural ‘metter, metter, metter,' before I manage to say that I feel faint. He looks up and down the deserted Main Road, quickly, anxiously, and I wonder whether he thinks of Father appearing from around a corner.

He says, ‘I have a friend just a few yards away. You could sit down there and rest.' I would rather go back to the surgery, but he assumes my assent and leads me down an affluent white residential street. ‘It's so hot,' I say apologetically; I am dimly aware of the fact that I do not want to be here. It is clear that he is irritated by me.

We turn into a lane lined with hibiscus blossoms that bellow their well-being from flame-red trumpets, and enter at a side gate. Behind the house, after the beds of dahlias and obedient rows of pink gladioli, we come to a flat-roofed building. Its door faces away from the house, clearly the servant's room. The occupant, still wearing her white apron, sits on the step, her door ajar. She has kicked off her shoes and the bunion on her right foot looks bruised.

‘Middag,' she says moodily. He explains hurriedly in Afrikaans that he needs the room, that I, Mr Shenton's daughter from England, feel faint.

She puts on her shoes and from her apron pocket takes a key which she throws at him. She walks off without a word towards the house.

There is a single bed with a candy-striped cotton cover against the far wall. A door leading into a cramped lavatory stands ajar. He is familiar with this room. He takes a plastic mug from the cupboard, fills it with water and passes it to me. I drink greedily. The bed is soft. My body sinks into it and I drift off to a faint lullaby of rain dripping from a beam.
Kitty miaows plantively but darkness falls, and I am drawn into, dwindle, in the dark pupils narrowing to night.

When I come to he is on the floor, hurriedly replacing the spilled contents of his bag. I note a revolver, a map and a hipflask.

‘You were out cold for a couple of minutes,' he says.

‘What,' I ask, ‘do you need a revolver for?'

I do not expect a reply, but he answers earnestly, ‘In the bush there's a war going on that you know nothing of, that no newspaper will tell you about.'

‘I know,' and I look out at the bougainvillea pressing against the window. He says pleasantly, ‘Surprising that you lose your resistance to the heat so soon. Only ten years you've been away, actually eleven in January.' So he had been checking my movements in those last years when I had neither seen him nor thought about him. He waits in vain for me to betray my surprise before he continues, ‘Tell me about the green and pleasant land.'

I reel off the words. ‘In autumn the trees lose their leaves so that camouflage gear would be as conspicuous as party dress. I collect leaves from Sherwood forest, beech, oak, bracken, and soak them in glycerine.'

His first smile, wry. ‘Why?' he asks.

‘To heighten the colour, preserve them, before pressing for ornamental use.'

It is true that I once pressed some leaves but then I did not know about the preserving qualities of glycerine. I found the leaves months later in the Yellow Pages but the urgency of my search for a plumber made me drop them and they crushed under my feet.

‘Hm,' he says, ‘your breasts are as lovely as they were fifteen years ago.'

Propped up on my right elbow, my blouse has slipped
down that shoulder. The top button has come undone and what can be seen of my breasts is moulded to their advantage by the supporting pillow. I sit up briskly, appalled by his presumption. But he jumps up to sit next to me, his hand smoothing the stripes of the fabric between us. He soothes with his voice.

‘I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I've forgotten how shy you are.'

I see no advantage in pointing out that his regret is ill-focused; I do not necessarily believe his regret.

His hand moves to my ankle and a finger hovers over a scratch that I had not noticed before.

‘How did it happen?'

I am grateful for the provision of something to focus on. The scratch is deeper than it appears and I am surprised that I do not know its origin. I concentrate until the neat line of dried blood knitted purlwise into the healed flesh unravels under the insistent movement of his thumb. So that the blood seeps afresh from the gash. A crisp winter's morning cracks open to reveal a uniform world encased in fire-white frost. I pick a sprig of parsley and twirl it between my fingers. Shit, shit, shit, I shout. I have come to expect parsley to survive the English winter. I kick the stems of the plants into the frozen ground, angry as a child.

‘Nice morning,' a voice breaks from the neighbouring rooftop. I look up into the face of a man in white overalls watching me with a rooftile held in his raised hand. He grins maliciously. I retreat, back into the hoary hawthorn hedge. The thorn drags through the flesh of my right ankle but I press against the untrimmed hedge. The man repeats, ‘Nice morning,' then incomprehensibly, ‘Gonna get the kettle on love?' I bolt. I cannot hear what he shouts. Drops of blood glow for a moment on the grubby kitchen floor
before they disappear into the dirt of the tiles.

‘Tell me,' he says again, ‘about England.'

His hand has travelled the length of my leg, my thigh. I keep still. I do not understand the source of his confidence. His eyes swivel on stalks as they travel the perimeter of my body. Dark as a reptile's they dart about my still outline, as if following the frantic flight of a trapped fly.

‘England,' he says musingly, by way of encouragement, ‘sounds green and peaceful.'

‘The telly will give you a better idea than I can. Mine will always be the view of a Martian.' He composes his face for pleasantries so that I add, ‘I don't want to talk.'

He would like to fuck me without my noticing. I will not allow him that luxury; my cowardice does not stretch to that. Fear seeps into the striped cotton cover crossed by the dark imprint of my sweating body. Somehow, I expect, it will be translated into desire, the assuagement of guilt. I follow his movements carefully. His hand creeps up my thigh. He leans over me and I do not draw away. But he merely wipes the sweat from my forehead. The profusion of sweat unnerves him. Or perhaps it is the urgency of the bulge as he deftly unzips his trousers and flicks out the terrifying thing of which I catch a glimpse only. I relax at his haste and correctly predict that it will not take long. My body registers a fleeting disappointment so that I have every reason to be pleased with the transaction.

He rests his head on my chest for a while before I go to the lavatory to clean up the mess. On the seat I inhale deeply and contract my stomach muscles to expel the stubborn semen. His voice is soft against the crackle of cheap toilet paper. ‘Have you seen your friend, Olga?'

‘Who?'

‘Olga Simson.'

Then I remember. I assume he has done his trousers up, that he is leaning against the wall, toying perhaps with his mirror shades.

Adolescent Olga, who had giggled upon meeting him, said too loudly, ‘That's not the Henry who writes those letters?'

‘No,' I whispered, ‘don't be silly. Would I be writing to a native?' and looked round for the last time into the wounded eyes that had seen it all.

When I come out of the lavatory I look into his mirrors and say briskly, ‘No, I lost touch with that set when I started college, long before I even left this country. All that was a long time ago.' I can do no more. I have always miscalculated the currency of sex.

Father stoops over a young peach tree. Its leaves have curled up into stubborn little funnels. He puts down the spray can and beams, ‘Just in time for a nice cup of coffee hey.'

The kitchen is hot. The gingham curtains are drawn against the wrath of the afternoon sun. He bangs the gauze door to and asks, ‘What does van Zyl say?'

Why does he have to shout? I answer quietly under the clatter of cups and coffeepot. ‘Didn't wait in the end. I met this bloke, Henry Hendrikse, you may remember him. He beat me a few times at primary school, came top of the class. Anyway I met him and went for a walk when I got fed up of waiting. Hmm,' I conclude with a cry of delight as he produces a little pot of cream, ‘this is heaven.'

‘Yes,' he says, ‘that boy turned up out of the blue about six months ago and then just disappeared again. People say that he works for the government, that he gets paid a lot of money for being a spy. People talk such blinking nonsense; what would the government need spies for?'