Cruel Crazy Beautiful World (2 page)

His mates
being his sidekicks: Canada Dry and Dove Bait. Men who’d die for him, he loves to tell me. There’s always a sulky hint that I would not.

He’d found a job in the dry docks for Canada Dry, that jackass of a dope-dealer, when he came out of jail.

For Dove Bait, cocky Casanova of the Cape Flats, he’d found a doctor to hook out a girlfriend’s unloved foetus with a bent bicycle spoke.

And then there’s another mate of his he’d hid in our attic for two years after he ran his foe Black Mamba down dead in the taxi wars. In his case it’s harder to tell how he reads Zero. He’s flinty and taciturn. He survived in the attic on tinned sardines and books I took out of the university library for him. He got hooked on Freud. When he ventured out again, he shaved his head bald to elude Black Mamba’s boys, had
Phoenix
tattooed on his forehead and juggled
tingalinging
Chinese Baoding balls in one palm. The old, upbeat taximan they called Bahaya was dead. Instead we had an iguana-eyed backyard guru in a faded pink Lacoste shirt who could dart a sparrow out of our lemon tree with his blowpipe.

Canada Dry, forever spaced out on grass, would jibe that the blowpipe was a
ganja
bong from the Congo and that it was as long as Dove Bait’s dong. Phoenix alone never cracks jokes, is never bawdy. He hears all their tall macho tales with a wry smile in a corner of his lips. Sometimes he gives me a conniving wink. He’s even-keeled and
zen
as a spirit level. And yet I imagine he too would die for Zero.

– No proof, echoes Zero.

– So you’d rather I become a crook than a poet?

– You piss on the hand that feeds you, Jerusalem.

Zero spits gob at the wind. His calling me by my full name is a sign he’s riled.

– Besides, in other countries you can freely trade the things I sell. The law’s fickle. Yesterday’s jailbirds are today’s heroes in this crazy land. What’s black market now you’ll find in the 7-Eleven tomorrow.

He puts his foot on the gas to go past a smoking, tilting taxivan. A
Zola Budd
. As we go by we hear the squawk of chickens in a cage on the taxi roof.

Zero wags his trigger finger at me.

– Just remember this. This
crook
money put you through university. And you still beg for pocket money whenever you go out.

I just keep my eyes on the road ahead.

At the Strand a black dog lopes along the sand. A longboarder rides the foam.

I remember Miriam, my mother, scolding my father for going too far out to sea with me. He’d bait and cajole till the sand fell away and I doggy-paddled. He thought I was scared of the deep. I never told him I was scared of sharks, for he would have called me a
moffie
. My mother was not as far gone then. She’d stay huddled in the Benz and doodle on the margins of the newspaper till they became a mosaic of mermaids and turtles and nude girls. Or she’d sit on a sarong on the sand and peel a mandarin and flip the peels into my father’s snakeskin boots.

She still taught girls how to paint on silk, then. And she still coloured her lips.

– One day I’ll find a way of surviving by the pen.

– Survive, hey? By writing
po-ems
? Tell me then, what does a
po-em
fetch in the market?

This from the man who once told me magical stories out of his head. How did he end up so money-minded and arid?

A Chevy Silverado pickup rides hard on our tail.

– How much will folk fork out for a fresh metaphor, hey? And will you mark down one that’s fingered? Or does it flower, like an opal or a pussy, if you handle it?

Just so, my old man, unwittingly, uses poetry to put down poetry.

The Silverado flashes his headlights at us to shift left so he can zoom by.

Zero, glancing in the rearview, stays in his groove.

The Silverado hoots.

Zero flicks him a finger. No Silverado cowboy is going to hustle him off the road.

The Silverado hoots again.

Zero just laughs.

Opals. Another sideline of his. Along with uncut diamonds.

As for the other thing, an image of my sallow mother floats into my mind. Zero never goes out with her. There was a time when he had had to hide his white-skinned girl behind a veil. And the taboo had spiced their romance. She’d wear a slit-eyed burka to the beach and a Malay head cloth to the drive-in. The law forbade them to marry, so they went to Amsterdam. After Mandela came out of jail, they came home to Cape Town with my sister and me as mementos of their exile. And in Mandela’s rainbow land they no longer had to dodge and dive ... but by then their love had run dry. And folk no longer saw flicks at the drive-in.

While Zero cruises all over the Cape, my mother haunts the front yard, mumbling to her gnomes arcane words I am hard put to decipher. If she’s not communing with her gnomes she’s drifting in a dream.

Just ahead of us a surfboard flies off the roof rack of a jeep. It flick-flacks on the tarmac.

Zero swings hard to dodge it.

L
IMPOPO RIVER
.

Just as a rogue surfboard scratches paint off a Silverado far to the south, Jabulani Freedom Moyo surfaces from the muddy Limpopo that runs from Botswana to Mozambique and forms the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa.

As he runs along a bald footway under a power line, he reflects on how he became a fugitive.

Not that long ago he was still an English teacher at a high school in Bulawayo, in the Ndebele southlands. In the afternoons he coached cross-country, javelin, long jump and football. Though he cursed all the marking of papers, he loved the upbeat dialogue with his students.

One day, over tea in the staffroom, he’d remarked to his colleagues that Mugabe looked like a joker in his vivid, Java-print shirts – West African style. They had laughed. They felt no love for that Shona man who had commandeered their country. But one rat had felt it his duty to report him to the headmaster.

The headmaster (a Shona posted to Bulawayo by Mugabe) had made Jabulani stand up in front of all the schoolchildren in the school hall when he read out the crime (mocking Mugabe) and the verdict from Harare: Mister Moyo was fired. The headmaster had reminded his school that Mugabe was taught by Jesuits and had studied overseas and was therefore no joker. He’d said Mister Moyo was lucky not to be jailed.

Students and teachers had dared to hiss at the injustice of a teacher being shot down over a jibe. It was not as if Mister Moyo had tossed darts at the image of Mugabe, or had not stood still as Mugabe went by in his Benz convoy. If schoolboys in Bulawayo had learnt one thing, it’s this: in Zimbabwe the law is just a
panga
blade to cut down Mugabe’s foes.

The irony is that Mugabe had once been Jabulani’s hero in the
chimurenga
, the long fight for freedom. Jabulani had spent his boyhood bowing to the White Man in Rhodesia. He was halfway through high school when Mugabe had outfooted that old white Smith. Rhodesia was now Zimbabwe and Salisbury now Harare. And it was in this free Zimbabwe that Jabulani Freedom Moyo had become a human being who held his head up high.

But then the rumours had begun to bleed out. Of killings in the Ndebele south. Of corpses dumped down an old mineshaft. Of the raping of girls. Of white farmers run off farms that Mugabe then doled out to his mates. Of starving, uprooted farmhands camping in roadside gullies. And, in the end, the
jambanja
, the chaos of being tossed out, went beyond the farms and you saw the fugitives on the pavements in town holding quavering chickens and skinny goats and peanuts in Castrol cans.

Teachers had looked up from their newspaper or coffee when Jabulani had gone into the staffroom to empty his pigeonhole. Someone (the rat?) had posted a dry, flat frog in it. Teachers had defied the scowls of the Shona headmaster and stood and tapped their teaspoons against their teacups in a staccato tattoo of camaraderie. For Jabulani they risked their feet being beaten and their heads being
submarined
by a gang of Mugabe’s goons.

A student of his had come to his classroom to tell him that he’d learnt a myriad things in his class and that he now wanted to become a writer. He’d learnt how to tune in to the music of words. The boy had hidden his tears behind a hand and Jabulani had hugged him and put a Hemingway in his other hand. A book about a jinxed old fisherman was a curious gift to a boy who might never see the sea.

As Jabulani put his books and pens into a cardboard box, he had thought Zimbabwe’s hard-earned freedom was just like that giant marlin the old man took so long to reel in. And now it was being ravaged by sharks. But in this case the fisherman did not fend off the sharks that zeroed in on his catch. He too was hacking the fish down to its bare bones. That was what was so warped.

On the way out of school the headmaster had waylaid him and rifled through the box in Jabulani’s hands to see for himself whether Jabulani was not perhaps pinching a hole-punch or an Oxford dictionary. If Jabulani ran his country’s ruler down there was no telling how low he would go, was the headmaster’s parting shot.

Jabulani had taught at the school for fourteen years.

From then on he was a marked man and no school would hire him.

Hearing his old Datsun blow up one night, he’d run out into the strung-up corpse of the family’s cat.

They had painted
VIVA MUGABE
on the walls in cat blood.

Then he’d landed a job in a bicycle shop called Cheap John’s Cycle Repair. But they had burnt it down and Cheap John had blamed Jabulani for his misfortune. In a town where a synagogue had burnt out less than a year before, the police hardly noted the end of a bicycle shop. That was in June.

And for half a year now there’d been no meat to go with the half loaf of bread he’d stood in line for each afternoon. For half a year they had survived off the pittance his wife, Thokozile, earned as a nurse. For half a year his son and daughter had stared at him, wondering when he’d pull a rabbit out of the hat to recall the magic of the past.

Back then he’d come home high on football fever and down a beer on the front step while the cat licked his salty shins. He’d clap his hands as his son Panganai played guitar or beatboxed and his daughter Tendai hula-hooped or cartwheeled. In his pockets he’d have a guitar pick for Panganai and a hairpin for Tendai. And, after another quart or two of beer, he’d flirt with Thokozile, flipping up her skirt to pinch her ass.

Then he’d lost his post and all the fat and fun of his world had been pared away.

– You have to run away from that
gandanga
Mugabe, that murderer, Thokozile had said while rats fidgeted in the roof overhead.

The rats had got out of hand since the cat died.

– He will hunt you, that fucking
gandanga
. And he will kill you. Just as he will kill anyone, Shona or not, who is his foe.

– How can I go?

– You have to, otherwise we hunger to the bone. Now, before Christmas, is a good time to go to South Africa. All tourists from overseas go to Cape Town for Christmas holidays and they have money in their pockets. You will find a job and send us money.

– Where will I stay?

– Other men find a way. You may be so lucky and find a job in a bar where they put a roof over your head.

Though she’d cajoled him in this way, she’d never blamed him for the way things had panned out. She’d never reminded him that a dumb, flippant joke of his had cursed them. Though he no longer flirted so cockily, she’d still lured him to her in the dark, telling him he’d always be her man. And after their loving he’d blow cool wind from his lips along the scalp-skin furrows between her cornrows.

And it was not just her. The holes in Panganai’s Pumas told him he had to go. The faded, let-down hem of Tendai’s school skirt told him he had to go. The empty breadbox told him he had to go. A stone through the kitchen window told him he had to go. The bark of stray dogs as he lay awake at night told him he had to go. Somehow he had to find a life for them beyond this rat-riddled madness of starving and scavenging, of fearing and flinching.

Yet he was dead scared of heading south.

He’d heard of the crocodiles and the undertow in the Limpopo.

He’d heard of border soldiers on the far bank of the Limpopo who’d shoot you and hide your corpse rather than deal with the paperwork to deport you.

He’d heard of the
gumagumas
: roving, raping swindlers who lurk in the
bundu
and hoodwink your money out of you.

He’d heard of vigilante South African farmers who ride pickups through the borderlands and shoot at stray Zimbabweans. The farmers blame them for the looting and random murders. In the old days the border had been guarded by drafted white-boy soldiers. Now there is no draft in South Africa and the borders are riddled with holes.

He’s heard from the deported that in a border town called Musina a police captain has photos of dead refugees on file. This girl called Jendaya was raped and stabbed by the
gumagumas
. They found her with her panties on her head. This boy called Goodwill was robbed and stabbed by the
gumagumas
. In his pocket was a paper in the hand of his schoolteacher, pleading for pills to cure his mother of the blood in her spit.

He had no money for the
malaishas
, the human smugglers (half upfront, half on arrival). He had no friend in Cape Town to shack up with till he found his feet.

If he survived crocodiles and soldiers,
gumagumas
and vigilantes, and somehow got a ride to Cape Town, then he’d need to beg for asylum papers from Home Affairs. And until he had papers he’d have to dodge the Nigerians in this place and the Tanzanians in that place, the Gambians here and the Kenyans there. He’d have to skirt the townships where black South Africans blamed
dirty
Zimbabweans for pinching their jobs and their girls and for dabbling in witchcraft.

Yet he’s lucky he’s a man, for they may just give him asylum. They give no papers to boys and girls, so they have to survive in limbo. The boys camp under bridges, in roadside culverts and on outskirt dumps of junk and dirt. You see them (if you have eyes to look) in their ratty shorts and tacky flip-flops scavenging in bins, plucking at guitars conjured from paraffin tins, playing football with a dirty tennis ball, dodging motorcars to beg as the robots go from orange to red. Ether from a bottle of glue may send them on blurred, spinning trips. The girls you never see. They morph into maids, wives and whores. Never mermaids.