You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town (21 page)

‘So it was the children you wanted,' I interrupt.

His tone is defensive. ‘You miss the laughing and the crying and the fighting of the children. You don't always notice them when they're there but when they're gone the silence lurks in the corners like a sulking tokolos.'

The stick in his right hand sweeps careful arcs, clearing away the larger pebbles that fly off beyond its range. It is a young Jan Twakkie shoot, pliant, so that he is able to flatten some of its length on the ground and widen the clearing.

‘I shouted for them across the veld and Meid leaned over the latched lower door (Giel was flash; he had built a lower and upper door out of old planks) and she said, “Skittie, they won't come. They live here now with me. They'll see you tomorrow, they'll see you every day, but first they must get used to sleeping here.” And all the while she was flicking with a nail at one of the panels of the door where old green paint had been flaking off for years, and only at the end of her speech did she look up.'

He grinds his heels into the ground and shifts his haunches as he orders away the face, the burrowing nails.

‘Eeh,' he sighs, ‘I didn't need glasses in those days,' and he holds out his hand to have another look. I oblige. ‘Mine were the best eyes in Namaqualand.' I look dubiously into the faded pupils, dull like old marbles scratched over the years by boys who play rough and cheating games.

‘I had,' he insists. ‘Never a missing sheep.' But even this route betrays him into the story. ‘Except that once when
Baas Karel knew, but I didn't say a word, not a word about Giel.'

Skitterboud wrinkles his nose to adjust the glasses. He is resigned to telling the story. His Namaqua vowels dip sharply, angrily.

‘I said to the magistrate – his nose you know had disappeared by then. Funny that was, he ended up with quite a small nose for a white man, but his ears had grown, limp soutslaai leaves that fell from the close-clipped back and sides of his head like those of a freshly shorn merino. I could swear that he wasn't the magistrate but of course he was and anyway I had seen him only the once before, and I said to him, “It's Dapperman and Blom, the baby doesn't count, he's still drinking at his mamma.” And as before the magistrate looked up to the back of the courtroom and said in a voice of thunder to the wooden beam, “Magriet September is the lawfully wedded wife of Johannes” (that's my real name) “and has no right to take away with her anything from his house. Everything, from the children to the last scrap of underclothing she is wearing, belongs to him and is his right to retrieve.”

‘Now yes, at that point I shut my ears and listened no more and when I came out I spat out those words into the hot red sand and watched it sizzle. And there was nothing to do about my shame. I just had to wear it like the tie and jacket I bought from Baas Karel for the court. Everyone knew where I had been that day, the whole of Rooiberg knew of the filthy words of the magistrate. That he should want me to make her undress and keep all her clothes and send her running across to Giel naked under the roasting sun. Well, I shut my door when I got home and didn't go down to Oompie Piet's where a huge fire burned in the shelter and lit the faces of those listening to Oompie Piet's
stories. No, I went to sleep on those shameful words.'

‘Skittie,' I say, breaking the silence, ‘perhaps you had better keep the glasses. I expect they will be more useful to you.'

His face cracks with a cock-a-doodle-doo of laughter so that I jump at the opportunity.

‘So you and Meid became good neighbours?'

‘Yes,' he replies tersely. ‘I stayed in town till the evening and brought back a flagon of wine which I finished behind that closed door. So I found my way over to Giel's house and dragged her out and slapped her once, twice, before Giel stopped me. It was a bitter day of shame for me, but you see when I woke up the next morning in the ditch where Giel had dropped me I knew that under the red eye of the sun we could drink a cup of coffee together. Meid always knew things. She wouldn't have allowed me to hit her if it wasn't for the baby in her belly. She said straight away that it was the fault of the magistrate; that the tokolos lurking about Rooiberg had an uncommonly large nose.'

Skitterboud walks off without further explanation. His chin is raised in recognition of the glasses he wears so that his last words whirl off in a gust of wind. I watch the slight figure lean hare-like as he makes his way across the veld.

A
SH ON MY SLEEVE

Desmond is a man who relies on the communicative powers of the handshake. Which renders my hand, a cluster of crushed bones, inert as he takes a step back and nods approvingly while still applying the pressure. He attempts what proves impossible in spite of my decision to cooperate. That is to stand back even further in order to inspect me more thoroughly without releasing my hand. The distance between us cannot be lengthened and I am about to point out this unalterable fact when his smile relaxes into speech.

‘Well what a surprise!'

‘Yes, what a surprise,' I contribute.

It is of course no longer a surprise. I arranged the meeting two months ago when I wrote to Moira after years of silence between us, and yesterday I telephoned to confirm the visit. And I had met Desmond before, in fact at the same party at which Moira had been struck by the eloquence of his handshake. Then we discussed the role of the Student Representative Council, he, a final year Commerce student, confidently, his voice remaining even as he bent down to tie a shoe-lace. And while I floundered, lost in subordinate clauses, he excused himself with a hurried, ‘Back in a moment.' We have not spoken since.

‘You're looking wonderful, so youthful. Turning into something of a swan in your middle age hey!'

I had thought it prudent to arrange a one-night stay which would leave me the option of another if things went well. I am a guest in their house; I must not be rude. So I content myself with staring at his jaw where my eyes fortuitously alight on the tell-tale red of an incipient pimple. He releases my hand. He rubs index finger and thumb together, testing an imagined protuberance, and as he gestures me to sit down the left hand briefly brushes the jaw.

It always feels worse than it looks, he will comfort himself, feeling its enormity; say to himself, the tactual never corresponds with the appearance of such a blemish, and dismiss it. I shall allow my eyes at strategic moments to explore his face then settle to revive the gnathic discomfort.

Somewhere at the back of the house Moira's voice has been rising and falling, flashing familiar stills from the past. Will she be as nervous as I am? A door clicks and a voice starts up again, closer, already addressing me, so that the figure develops slowly, fuzzily assumes form before she appears: ‘. . . to deal with these people and I just had to be rude and say my friend's here, all the way from England, she's waiting . . .'

Standing in the doorway, she shakes her head. ‘My God Frieda Shenton, you plaasjapie, is it really you?'

I grin. Will we embrace? Shake hands? My arm hangs foolishly. Then she puts her hands on my shoulders and says, ‘It's all my fault. I'm hopeless at writing letters and we moved around so much and what with my hands full with children I lost touch with everyone. But I've thought of you, many a day have I thought of you.'

‘Oh nonsense,' I say awkwardly. ‘I'm no good at writing letters either. We've both been very bad.'

Her laughter deals swiftly with the layer of dust on that old intimacy but our speech, like the short letters we exchanged, is awkward. We cannot tumble into the present while a decade gapes between us.

Sitting before her I realise what had bothered me yesterday on the telephone when she said, ‘Good heavens man I can't believe it . . . Yes of course I've remembered . . . OK, let me pick you up at the station.'

Unease at what I now know to be the voice made me decline. ‘No,' I said. ‘I'd like to walk, get to see the place. I can't get enough of Cape Town,' I gushed. For her voice is deeper, slowed down eerily like the distortion of a faulty record player. Some would say the voice of a woman speaking evenly, avoiding inflection.

‘I bet,' she says, ‘you regretted having to walk all that way.'

She is right. The even-numbered houses on the left side of this interminable street are L-shaped with grey asbestos roofs. Their stoeps alternate green, red and black, making spurious claims to individuality. The macadamised street is very black and sticky under the soles, its concrete edge of raised pavement a virgin grey that invites you to scribble something rude, or just anything at all. For all its neat edges, the garden sand spills on to the pavement as if the earth were wriggling in discomfort. It is the pale porous sand of the Cape Flats pushed out over centuries by the Indian Ocean. It does not portend well for the cultivation of prizewinning dahlias.

I was so sure that it was Moira's house. There it was, a black stoep inevitably after the green, the house inadequately fenced off so that the garden sand had been swept along the
pavement in delicately waved watermark by the previous afternoon's wind. A child's bucket and spade had been left in the garden and on a mound of sand a jaunty strip of astroturf testified to the untameable. I knocked without checking the number again and felt foolish as the occupier with hands on her hips directed me to the fourth house along.

Moira's is a house like all the others except for the determined effort in the garden. Young trees grow in bonsai uniformity, promising a dense hedge all around for those who are prepared to wait. The fence is efficient. The sand does not escape; it is held by the roots of a brave lawn visibly knitting beneath its coarse blades of grass. Number 288 is swathed in lace curtains. Even the glass-panelled front door has generously ruched lengths of lace between the wooden strips. Dense, so that you could not begin to guess at the outline approaching the door. It was Desmond.

‘Goodness me, ten, no twelve years haven't done much to damage you,' Moira says generously.

Think so Moi,' Desmond adds. ‘I think Frieda has a contract with time. Look, she's even developed a waistline,' and his hands hover as if to describe the chimerical curve. There is the possibility that I may be doing him an injustice.

‘I suppose it's marriage that's done it for us. Very ageing, and of course the children don't help,' he says.

‘It's not a week since I sewed up this cushion. What do the children do with them?' Moira tugs at the loose threads then picks up another cushion to check the stitching.

‘See,' Desmond persists, ‘a good figure in your youth is no guarantee against childbearing. There are veins and sagging breasts and of course some women get horribly fat; that is if they don't grow thin and haggard.' He looks
sympathetically at Moira. Why does she not spit in his eye? I fix my eye on his jaw so that he says, ‘Count yourself lucky that you've missed the boat.'

Silence. And then we laugh. Under Desmond's stern eye we lean back in simultaneous laughter that cleaves through the years to where we sat on our twin beds recounting the events of our nights out. Stomach-clutching laughter as we whispered our adventures and decoded for each other the words grunted by boys through the smoke of the braaivleis. Or the tears, the stifled sobs of bruised love, quietly, in order not to disturb her parents. She slept lightly, Moira's mother, who said that a girl cannot keep the loss of her virginity a secret, that her very gait proclaims it to the world and especially to men who will expect favours from her.

When our laughter subsides Desmond gets a bottle of whisky from the cabinet of the same oppressively carved dark wood as the rest of the sitting-room suite.

‘Tell Susie to make some tea,' he says.

‘It's her afternoon off. Eh . . .' Moira's silence asserts itself as her own so that we wait and wait until she explains, ‘We have a servant. People don't have servants in England, do they? Not ordinary people, I mean.'

‘It's a matter of nomenclature I think. The middle classes have cleaning ladies, a Mrs Thing, usually quite a character, whom we pretend to be in awe of. She does for those of us who are too sensitive or too important or intelligent to clean up our own mess. We pay a decent wage, that is for a cleaner, of course, and not to be compared with our own salaries.'

Moira bends closely over a cushion, then looks up at me and I recall a photograph of her in an op-art mini-skirt, dangling very large black and white earrings from delicate
lobes. The face is lifted quizzically at the photographer, almost in disbelief, and her cupped hand is caught in movement perhaps on the way to check the jaunty flick-ups. I cannot remember who took the photograph but at the bottom of the picture I recognise the intrusion of my right foot, a thick ankle growing out of an absurdly delicate high-heeled shoe.