Africa39 (52 page)

I started thinking of this country that I loved that didn’t want to love me back. I remember how excited I had been when I left Oxford. How I nurtured a dream of coming back to Africa and joining hands with other like-minded Africans to save the continent. But since I arrived I had realised something.

In South Africa, an African country, I was just what I had been in England. An immigrant. To the white South Africans who sat on the board of AfriAID, I was probably filling the quota of the black head count. To black South Africans I was one of them
kwerekweres
because I allegedly took one of their brothers’ jobs. I would think (without ever vocalising), ‘Aren’t I a brother too?’

Other immigrants had the benefit of escaping in their work or having a salary that they could sufficiently utilise to give themselves little vacations and weekend treats of a glass of single malt. But not me. I no longer had job satisfaction – neither from the love for my job nor from the pay (or was that peanuts?) I earned.

I wanted to quit but I couldn’t. If I quit, I’d no longer have a valid work permit. People in the developmental field were a dime and dozen in the UK, so there was no way I was going back there.

The only other place I could go to was Zimbabwe and I could not, would not, go back there. Only a fool would repatriate while the rest of the country was escaping. There had to be a way that I could stay in my beloved Jozi but with a job that gave credit to my academic training without reducing me to a yes-man, to an annoying sell-out of a black man.

Then I had what I thought was a brainwave. I scrolled down my cell phone and dialled her number.

‘Grace speaking, hello?’ she answered.

‘Well hello to you too. What, you don’t call your old colleagues to see how they are doing?’ I asked.

‘Oh, my God, Tinaye, is that you?’ she screamed and I had to hold the phone a little distant from my ear.

Grace had been a receptionist at AfriAID. She got disillusioned when she was asked to help with the bookkeeping and realised she was the lowest-paid employee but could never convince the powers that be that she needed a raise. Grace was going to be my ticket out of AfriAID while I continued staying in Joburg.

In this business, I deal with statistics all the time.

According to Stats SA, South African women work twenty-six per cent longer hours than their men. I was willing to work hard. I was not bad looking either with my brilliant mind and good looks. That made me a catch. If I could get a job that allowed me to stay, I could work my way to marrying a South African woman, get my residency, and eventual citizenship.

I had decided Grace would be that woman.

I see you are judging me for being mercenary. How easy it is for you. You are probably South African, or have never faced my dilemma. I never planned to hurt anyone. All I wanted was a fair chance to earn an honest living but had the misfortune of not being born in.

My friend and former colleague Mzilikazi had left to work in Cape Town because he had that flexibility. I couldn’t do the same.

Grace was an easy choice for me.

When she was still at AfriAID, I always had the feeling that Grace was interested in me. Whenever she came to me to sign documents, she would linger a little too long chatting and lean into me. I had not entertained her then but there was no reason why I couldn’t entertain her now. There was no conflict of interest and she was a beautiful woman. I only hoped there was no boyfriend lurking in the background. As I said before, Grace was a beautiful woman.

‘Yes, it’s me. How are you?’

‘I am lovely thanks,’ she answered.

‘I am just calling to see whether you have any plans this Friday?’ I asked.

I heard Grace drawing a breath and then sighing.

I knew I had her.

Even if she had plans, she would probably cancel them.

Her response was coy. ‘It depends on what you have in mind,’ she said.

‘What I had in mind was dinner, perhaps some dancing, and some drinks, and then we see where it goes. What do you say?’

‘I would love to. Can you come and pick me up from my workplace then?’ she enquired.

‘Sure thing. Give me the address.’

And that is how Grace and I became an item.

She worked in Rosebank and on that first date when I walked up to Primi Piatti with her, I could sense every man in the room looking up and wishing they were me.

Grace was the embodiment of beauty – African or otherwise. She had luscious lips that were made for kissing, a nose that was just perfect for her face and dimples that seemed to be etched on her face as they stayed in place whether she was smiling or not.

Her greatest features though, were her eyes. Large and expressive, even when what they expressed was not much, which was frequent. They had long lashes that had nothing to do with any of those television-advertised volumising mascaras. A man couldn’t look at Grace for any length of time without feeling as though they were drowning in her eyes. I still commended myself for self-control for not having dated her when she was at AfriAID.

She was almost as tall as me with a fair complexion – what South Africans term a yellow bone. She had the long legs of a catwalk model and now as always, she wore them to advantage in a miniskirt and heels.

Forget Beyoncé, this girl had a bum that was curved and firm as though worked on by some architect who’d had all the time in the world.

And that was Grace. Beautiful.

We sat down and ordered.

‘So what took you so long to call?’ she asked as I drank my double whisky and she sipped on her Smirnoff Spin while we waited for our starters.

Ah ha. So she had been waiting for my call.

‘I wanted you to break up with your other boyfriend first,’ I answered.

‘What other boyfriend?’

Great. She didn’t have a boyfriend. Or he was so inconsequential she was willing to lie about his existence. This was working well for me.

We had sex that very first night, just as I knew we would and she spent the weekend at my place.

Soon Primi became our spot and Grace my weekend shift. However, beautiful as Grace was, conversations with her were painful. In conversation she had nothing to add and when she picked up a newspaper, it would be to relay to me some ‘fact’ that she had read of, such as some woman being raped by a tokoloshe in Limpopo, or something along those lines.

The sex was good. The conversation was expectedly dull. Grace wasn’t the brightest light bulb in the tool shed. Whenever she came to ‘sleep’ at my Melville home, I had perfected the art of feigning sleep after sex. Marriage to her would be a tedious affair but I knew, with a good job, I could always get lost in my work so long as I paid the bills and bought her a twelve pack of Smirnoff Spin on the weekends.

Perhaps it’s true that we men are never content.

But that was probably said by some bra-burning, man-hating woman.

I was content with Grace, I swear I was. It’s just that I kept getting the feeling that there was something better out there.

But time wasn’t on my side. I had decided I would date her for a respectable six months then propose to her. We would get married. I would become a resident, and then get a better job. Then I’d leave her after a reasonable amount of time.

And then it happened.

In the fifth month of my courtship (for that is what I now thought of it) with Grace, I met Slindile.

I should have ignored Sli. I didn’t need any complications to my perfect Grace plan, but temptation was strong. And I, I was weak.

Hiding in Plain Sight

Mary Watson

The witch had been riding her back again. She sometimes did in the small hours of the night when everyone else was asleep. Meg felt, though could not see, that there was someone just above her chest, as if dropped from the ceiling. Her arms were pinned down, tied by invisible ropes. She wanted to turn on the lamp but could not move.

‘Old hag,’ her mother told her. ‘
Kanashibari
, if you’re in Japan.’

In bed at night, Meg was plagued by screeching fiddles from distant houses, by rats scurrying across narrow roads. She was bothered by mice nestling in her boots, slugs burrowing beneath the grass. Light leaked in through the chinks in the curtains and seeped into her dreams. During the day, ravens and crows beat their black wings towards her, or else hovered just off the edge of her vision, biding their time. Her mother insisted it was nonsense; there was no way that she could hear the fiddles and rats. She just needed to be still. Shut your eyes. Shut out the light and fall asleep.

‘The ravens and crows aren’t interested in you,’ her mother said, stuffing a white envelope with an application form for a job at a school. ‘Put a pillow over your head.’

Those early months in Ireland were marked by an elusive disquiet. They had arrived at Kiln House with four suitcases, a dog-eared copy of
You
magazine, a Table Mountain key ring in Meg’s back pocket, and a small beaded doll with crazy eyes from the airport curio shop.

‘But you don’t have any keys,’ her mother had said, nudging towards the departure gate.

No keys, no house, no home. Meg’s father had died because of his kindness to strangers. And because her husband was gone, Catriona had wanted to leave. She seemed to blame her adopted country for the death of her husband. Within a few short months, they had packed up their things, sold their house and arranged new schools for Meg and Damien. They would squat with their Aunt Maire until they were settled in Ireland.

‘Is that a present for me?’ Maire eyed the doll in Meg’s hand as she entered Kiln House. Not really a doll, but an artefact. A souvenir from her life before. Hot sunshine, the lemon tree in the garden, taxis screaming through the main road, the colour and noise of a different world were bound up in that doll and in the plastic mountain-shaped key ring.

‘No.’

‘She’s rather like her father, isn’t she?’ Maire said in a voice that belied her broad smile. Uncle John carried their suitcases in.

Kiln House was pockmarked with grey pebbledash. It had low doors that forced Uncle John to stoop, and a narrow, dark staircase that sucked you up inside its guts. The house was so obscurely located that Meg was sure the mess of low stone walls was designed to misdirect visitors. A higgledy-piggledy house surrounded by higgledy-piggledy stone walls in a teeny tiny village called Arse End, Nowhere.

Kiln House served a dubious function as a bed and breakfast, the kind with smoke-stained net curtains and faded floral tablecloths draped over chipboard tables. Plastic carnations in made-in-China rosebud vases. Inexplicably, they had a decent passing trade, which seemed to be made up of customers who returned over the years. Maire was tighter than a gnat’s chuff while Uncle John was inclined to hand out free things to his friends. And it only took a drink or two to become his friend. Meg had seen him handing over a clutch of miniature soaps and shampoos to bewildered children. It was something of a nervous tic, the need to hand over his worldly goods. It was impossible to have a conversation without him trying to give her sweets or money or his handkerchief or whatever he could lay his hands on at the time. Uncle John was one of those men with a shed. The exact purpose of the shed was a mystery, but whatever it was seemed to need a large amount of time. Meg tried looking through the windows, but couldn’t see beyond a jumble of mismatched furniture and electrical objects.

Maire, on the other hand, had an impressive collection of Mills & Boon’s hidden in the utility room cupboard so Meg decided to make a study of human relationships from these probably flawed texts. At sixteen, her own experience was non-existent. Reading them from behind the covers of books about hobbits, Meg was seen to make an exceptionally slow journey to Mordor that wet May. She had inhaled several of the purple-covered Mills & Boon’s and had substantially improved her education. Though she possibly learned all the wrong things from those books. They placed an unnecessary emphasis on tall strangers with imperfect social skills.

Lethargic from her late night reading about gasping virgins and commanding men, Meg took to walking in the afternoons, climbing wobbly looking dry stone walls. And she would find a soft grassy spot, buffering the damp with a fleece. Or, if it was really wet, she would sit at a window and watch.

‘It’s only weather,’ her mother said, misunderstanding.

Catriona underestimated weather. Because there was something frightening about the Irish countryside in the late spring. Things grew too eagerly. It would seem mild and idyllic, new life emerging after a sleeping winter. But after intermittent sunshine and extended damp, the budding trees and flowers flourished, the growth unchecked. Briars tendrilled towards Meg, catching at her clothes and pulling her into a damp slug-ridden undergrowth. The smell of fresh, that reek of new life, assaulted her sinuses. Even when it was dry, the leaves budded on trees at an alarming rate; if she fixed her eyes on them, Meg was sure she could see them actually growing. That May at Kiln House, it seemed that the countryside was quietly hysterical.

The Clearys arrived just before the end of May. Most visitors stayed only a night, stopping on their way between two points. The house was never a destination in itself, only an interruption on the way to somewhere else. This puzzled Meg because the house did not appear to be the mid-point to anywhere. It felt tucked away, hidden and obscure. Years later, she found out that it was no more than five minutes from a busy arterial road – one of those narrow, winding country roads with a speed limit of one hundred kilometres an hour.