Cruel Crazy Beautiful World (11 page)

Just then Buyu jogs up, waving a fistful of notes at me.

– You see!

– I see.

– I got
double
what you wanted for the things.
Double!

– But that’s unethical.

Buyu laughs his white-white teeth at me.

– They went smiling away.

I tell the priest this is Buyu, who walked all the way from Tanzania.

– I see you two have been in the wars.

As a red herring I sing out:

– Buyu and I will find out what happened to your dog. Hey, Buyu?

Buyu flicks me a mock salute.

– That’s kind of you. Goodbye, Jerusalem. Goodbye, Buyu. And thank you for the tea, ma’am.

– Call me Lily, Hunter says.

– Lily. A beautiful name, he says as he goes.

Lily zero-mindedly shines the teacup with her rubbing cloth.

– How do we find a dog, Buyu?

He frowns as if figuring out a hard sum. Then his eyes spark.

– We go to the boys!

– Hey?

– The bus boys! They know every alleyway, every kitchen courtyard, every dustbin with no lid on. They have learnt to think like dogs.

– Cool.

– We’ll get them Kentucky, hey?

Just then the whale crier’s kelp horn sounds.

– The world’s gone haywire, says Hunter. The whales used to head south again for the Antarctic by the end of September. Then a few calving mothers stayed over Christmas. And now the dogs are vanishing.

– You think there’s a plot?

– Something’s awry. It may not be human.

– You mean black magic?

– I told you, things can get hazardous. Anything can happen.

I wonder if my mother can stop falling further out of focus. I wonder if Buyu and I can find the priest’s dog. Most of all, I wonder if Lotte can happen and how on earth I am to woo her shadowed by a ragtag boy and fairy-godmothered by a seller of fossils.

Shadows of seagulls drift and dart over the market floor.

A breeze sweeps along dust and longing.

C
APE TOWN. DUSK.

The fabled flat-spined mountain is a giant stone dragon rimmed with an orange haze.

Jake’s Kombi heads past the harbour of cranes and ship funnels and yacht masts jousting haphazardly. Sea tang, dockyard din and gull yells gust in through the wound-down windows. And out flow the jiving tones of Bafo Bafo at full volume.

Sails drift to and fro on the sea. Jabulani’s eyes are agape at the wonder of this duned, inverted sky.

And that flipped copper coin gone all verdigris is Robben Island, where they jailed Mandela for so long.

They hum along Strand Street, under tall palms dancing in the wind. Barefoot street boys laugh and whistle at the crazy-coloured Kombi singing by.

At robots they are hustled by boys jockeying to hawk things crafted from wire and men yelling the headlines or wanting to wipe dust-filmed windows.

Jabulani sees a white man begging amid diesel fumes and dud dreams.

Now zero on this earth can amaze Jabulani.

He feels lucky to ride high – however fleetingly – in a world where folk are begging, burning out, being shot at.

In Sea Point Jake finds a free bay on the seafront. They pick up fish and chips from a van and a few beers from a bottle store. They dodge skaters and joggers on the seafront path and hop over the railings and perch on rocks rimed with salt and seagull guano. Jabulani slides his good foot out of a rubber hospital clog and into the cool of a rock pool. Seagulls bicker and beg for chips. Jabulani’s beer can tips and beer froths out over the rocks like sea foam. He thinks of the blood spilt so he has the freedom to sit cooling his feet and filling his gut:
Poor Othello. Poor Nina. That man in the kiosk? The policeman in the hospital?

Jabulani reads the news his fish and chips is wrapped in:

Nigerian pub ransacked

‘Who are you? Where are you from?’ This has become the war cry of the young men roving the townships, armed to the teeth with hoes, stones and guns. Their mission is to root out foreigners, to loot their shacks, to rape their women. The targeted come from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Congo and beyond. Such foreigners, often in the country without a visa, are accused of taking locals’ jobs. It seems that apartheid is far from dead. It has resurfaced as xenophobia: the fear of foreigners. Police are slow to deal with attacks such as this one on an unlicensed Nigerian-run pub in Langa.

A police captain said: ‘Illegal foreigners have a penchant for crime. They don’t pay tax and they try to be clever by producing fake papers.’

The Nigerian pub keeper, who was formerly a journalist in Lagos, said: ‘I came to South Africa to escape persecution. I never thought this would happen in the country of Mandela.’

In downtown Cape Town, Bishop Tutu called for calm.

The sea flings white foam at the sky and the foam sticks like wet paper to form clouds.

Jabulani thinks of how this cockroachy thing called racism will always survive, somehow, in one form or another. He fears this rancour towards African foreigners they call
makwerekwere
... towards him: job-pincher, tax-dodger, would-be thief and paper-faker. The fear of this racist venom is as biting as the bullet wound in his hand. He shakes his head and focuses on the waves.

Their mad, macho fervour followed by a sighing, ebbing lull echoes the universal rhythm of wanting and sating. For now his hunger is stilled, but he wants an end to the throb of pain in his hand. And he has other wants. He wants to love his wife under a free sky. He wants to go on holiday to the seaside with Panganai and Tendai, for them to see this vista of shifting blue dunes and a diving sun. He wants to teach again, in a world where headmasters are not puppets of evil men and where boys and girls have the freedom to question the things they are taught. And where will a man find such a world if outsiders are hunted and shops burnt in this paradise called Cape Town?

Perhaps there’s a place overseas somewhere where a man may live out his life fearlessly. But perhaps there, where they have no fear of guns and stones and evil men, they learn to fear other things.

– Beautiful, hey? chirps Jake.

– Beautiful. I wish they could see this.

– Your wife and kids? One day they will.

Jabulani shakes his head and laughs a hissing laugh.

– Hey. It may be a pipe dream now, but you were born under a lucky star. I feel it in my bones.

How, Jabulani wonders, will this pipe dream convert to reality? Another man has put fish and chips in his hands. He wears this man’s shirt and jeans. He has no good shoes and not a cent to his name.

He flicks chips to the fussing, flapping seagulls. They swoop and catch midair.

To him the seagulls look like white crows. He imagines Panganai plucking his guitar and the seagulls diving to catch fragments of Marley.

And Jabulani dreams: There’ll be sunshine and wine and jokes and he’ll put his hands over Tendai’s eyes and she’ll peek through his fingers.

– Hey, Jabulani. A mate has a gig tonight. I said I’d go. You can come along and I’ll foot the bill for a few beers. And maybe I can find you a room with one of my mates. You see, my flat’s just a box. And my girlfriend’s writing her thesis and ...

Jabulani bends his head.

– She’s funny that way. She needs her karmic space.

Jabulani sees how naive it was of him to imagine this guy would wave a magic wand and conjure a roof and a job for him.

– It’s not that you’re black. She’d just get weirded out by my pitching up with a refugee. I’m sorry.

– Hey, you have ferried me to Cape Town for no money. You have risked your life for me. You have revived my hope. I will never forget you.

– I’ll just call in at the flat and then pick you up again. Stay where you are.
Ja
? I won’t be long. And I’ll lend you shoes. You look like a palooka in those things.

Now he’s back-pedalling to the van.

– You just stay put.
Ja
?

When Jake pitches up with a gift of rugby jersey and white Havaianas flip-flops, Jabulani has vanished.

Jake parks off on the rocks, rolls a jay, and hangs his head and smokes that jay dead.

The frangipani-sweet fragrance of the marijuana drifts to where Jabulani hides.

Then Jake flicks the jay stub away and gets down from the rocks. He hangs the jersey over the railing, puts the flip-flops down. Then he yells:

– Good luck, Freedom!

Then he’s gone.

Jabulani unwinds the bandage from his hand. He strips down to his jeans and wades into the sea. The jaggy pink bullet wound in his hand stings like blazes. It feels as if he’s rubbing a chilli into it. Yet he holds his hand under, so the salt can heal. It stings so sore he hardly notices the footnote sting of the cut in his foot. Then the cold numbs the pain and he yields to the giddy high of having made it to Cape Town.

Now he’s a boy in the sea, laughing as the waves flip over him.

He stays on the bench in the waning light till the wind blows his skin dry. Then he tugs on the rugby jersey. The dry salt on his skin catches slightly on the fabric. It smells of jasmine.

So subtly had their life become pared down to the bone over that last half-year in Zim. No flowery-smelling liquid to follow the Omo into the spinning drum, no sugar to sweeten the cheap coffee, no Johnnie Walker to dull the white noise of worry in his head.

He tears his old shirt and binds a strip of the cloth around his hand. He ties off the cloth with his teeth. He hoop-shoots a rubber clog at a wire bin on a lamp post. He scores. Then the other. This one dances on the rim before falling in. He interprets this as another good omen and smiles.

H
ERMANUS NEW HARBOUR. AFTER
dusk.

Buyu and I and the bus boys dangle feet from the harbour wall among hand-liners and languid lovers. They swig ice-cold Coca-Cola from cans and gnaw Kentucky off the bone. They throw bones to begging dogs and chips to cussing gulls.

From the gunwales of moored fishing boats cormorants forlornly eye us like some sorry Greek chorus. They spurn a flutter of fish tails under the hulls of the fishing boats.

The chief of the barefoot outcasts, in his dirty Kangol hat and boy-soldier shades, vows he’ll keep his eyes peeled for dog hunters.

Buyu hangs out with the bus boys on the harbour wall while I play old standards on my guitar for tourists and old fogeys in a shacky joint called Quayside Cabin. I wonder if Zero would view old standards (
Hotel California
,
Bad Moon Rising
,
Sweet Home Alabama
) as trading goods.

The kitchen’s in an old shipping container. From the roof hang fishing floats and other flotsam and funky junk. The girl waiters wear orange shirts. They are as boyish as hockey girls.

I play for free calamari and chips and tips. I play till my fingertips sting.

At midnight I find Buyu alone on the hull of a capsized trawler in dry dock. We share the calamari and chips. I think of my one-man play. It was staged in a dry dock at the Cape Town waterfront. It was interspersed with the barks of seals and the jeers of gulls.

A seal on the slipway honks at us and we flick him a bit of calamari. He just sniffs at it in a smirky way. He wants his fish raw. He slides sullenly into the harbour.

We lie down on the hull. Scorpio forms a stippled question mark on the blackboard of the sky.

– Buyu, I’m in love with a green-eyed girl.

– Where’s she?

– Here in Hermanus.

– How come you hide her from me?

– She has a boyfriend.

– Shit.

– Yeah. Shit. I’m hooked, man. I’m bleeding, I tell you.

– No other girl is good?

– It’s not
girl
. It’s her.

– Then you have to catch her.

– How? I play my guitar and you dance like a monkey?

– I’m not your monkey.

– Sorry. It was a joke.

– Tell me her name.

I waver, scared the magic in her name will fade if I say it to another.

– Lotte.

–
Lo-ta.
Good for a song, hey?

I sigh.

– You go play again before they fire you.

When I come out again, I have a bottle of beer for me and a Fanta for Buyu and money in my pocket. It feels good to have earned the money, for the market takings are, at the end of the day, another of my old man’s handouts.

A hunter’s moon hangs over the harbour.

I sing and strum
Moonshadow
for Buyu. The sting in my fingertips is the sting of longing for Lotte.

A young whale blows in the harbour.

Buyu is up on his feet, dancing on the arced hull.

– Play, play, he cries. That whale, she loves your guitar.

Now I too am dancing on the hull under the moon, singing to a whale, wishing I had a way to tune into his undersea poetry.

The few folk still lingering over an espresso or a Don Pedro come helter-skeltering out of Quayside Cabin. They flash cameras and howl a hullabaloo till the whale dives and is gone.

Buyu and I ride the Vespa along the potholed roads of Zwelihle township. Hardly human figures slide along sandy paths through a maze of wonky tin-roofed shacks or hold hands out to the star-sparks of a brazier. Skinny dogs stalk the flickering firelight and bark at us out of the dark, but none look at all akin to a yellow, fat-gut lab. A whore slants against the door frame of a shack, advertising firelit skin. Two swaying men sing an off-key karaoke to a song on a radio: a yearning and sorrow no hooker can cure.

The fire and the dark, the moon and the sea, they tango on and on.

On the other side of the road sits one lone, tilting bivouac in a wasteland lot of cracked glass and wire snakes and half bricks. Maybe the hideout of a
sangoma
, a medicine man.

Or of a man whittled down to the bone by The Virus. Another snubbed, sidelined soul. It was always thus. It has yet to happen.

L
ONG STREET, CAPE TOWN.

Jabulani figures all the foreigners have a gig on the go. Glib-tongued traders sell marijuana, second-hand iPods, fake Ray-Bans and bootleg films from India. One capering fellow lures motorcars into parking bays with theatrical hand signals. Another wipes windows of motorcars free of sea salt and butterfly flecks. Another has revived the dead art of the shoeblack. Yet another dude in dirty dreads sounds his didgeridoo on a street corner, a haunting drone pervaded randomly by gull shouts and hooting and the clang of a church bell.