The Boy Next Door (21 page)

“Looks like you’re going to be in for a long holiday,” Ian says when I get home.

The university has been closed indefinitely.

During the impromptu closure, I work four afternoons a week at the advertising agency, and on one of my lunch breaks, I find
Ilo’s studio squashed in between a shoe repair stall and a tailor, several meters inside a narrow passageway. If I wasn’t
looking for it, I would have missed it. I open the door and I see what Ian means. The old black and whites on the walls, some
on matte, some on gloss, giving the whole place an old glamorous movie-like feel. I turn around and I go to one wall which
is covered with different studio images of one woman. What did Ian call them? Soft. I lift my hand and I’m startled by a discreet
cough behind me, and when I turn, there is a man in a white dustcoat. He’s just a bit taller than me and there are sprigs
of hair on his mottled bald head. He rubs his glasses with his sleeve and puts them back on. He looks at me, then he gently
takes my hand, pats it.

“So you are the one,” he says.

He takes me to the back room and there, hanging on a string from one end of the wall to another, are images of me.

And I see that Ian’s been experimenting with lighting and texture. With stillness and movement. With the whole and parts of
the whole.

I stand there taking it all in.

“Un uomo innamorato.”

And I understand.

When I come back from helping with a shoot at a housing site for a building society’s advertising campaign, after having lugged
film equipment over rubble, getting my new skirt covered in red dirt, thus fulfilling my job title of production assistant,
also known as General Dogsbody, I come back to the office to find Ian sitting on my desk and Leeann, the receptionist, in
an apparent state of rapture.

“Jeez man, Lindiwe, you look like you’ve been out and about in a war zone.”

I look past Ian at Leeann who is all shiny, pink and scrubbed and has her eyes latched onto Ian’s head.

“I came to take you out for lunch.”

There’s a sigh from behind Ian and he turns around.

I think of saying a Leeann kind of thing, “Oh, luv, I have to go into the ladies room and freshen up.”

Leeann smiles at him, and I’m delighted to see that despite her continual tweaking and touching ups, there is a smudge of
red on one of her pearly whites.

“You’re such a gentleman,” she exhales.

Mr. Poll, the agency director, comes over and dumps a bag of gigantic prawns on my desk.

“Have to clean the whole lot of those before four. Need them for the Bon Marché advert.”

Another sigh coming from the usual direction, accompanied by the tip-tap of a pencil on a pad.

Ian slides off the desk.

“She’s got plans this afternoon,” he says, picking up the bag and dumping it on Leeann’s desk.

“Ian, it’s fine.”

“Lunch, Lindiwe.”

And he pulls me along with him.

We walk into town, up into Barbours department store to the restaurant on the terrace. We take a table right at the far end,
away from the bustle of people coming in, going out.

“Privacy,” says Ian. “I’ve got major news.”

“And I thought you just wanted to take a girl out.”

“Just wait for it.”

The waiter comes, and I order a Coke and a cheese sandwich; Ian, a Castle and a steak roll.

“So, what is it?”

“I got a visit from someone today over at work.”

“Yes.”

I’ve only been up once to TV Sales and Hire since Ian’s been taken on full-time; I caught him in his office looking as though
he had just woken up from a nap, and I could smell Listerine on his breath, which meant that he had been drinking.

Despite his distinct lack of enthusiasm, he has been rapidly promoted to manager.

“Yah, Lindiwe I know,” he said when he came home with the tag on his blue shirt. “What can I do? I’m just benefiting from
the system; we need the dosh. What am I going to say, ‘No, thanks, please, please promote Charles there, your loyal black
employee who’s been at his job for years and knows it like the back of his hand’?’ It’s how the world works. And anyway, I
give Charles lots of time off, paid; I reckon he’s collecting two paychecks. I’m doing the bloke a favor, trust me.”

“I’ll ask Charles next time I see him,” I said and regretted it as soon as the words came out of my mouth. Ian had finally
managed to tap into the old boys’ network care of Heather.

“Better than actually
fixing
the fridges,” he told me. “I supervise the fixing of the
fricking
fridges. To be honest, most of the time I’m bored shitless. It’s a job.”

Ian gets through the Castle in a couple of dregs and signals the waiter for another one.

“So this chap, he comes right up to me and starts on about my old man, the good old days, and he’s talking full blast. Anyway,
he was reeking of booze, really down-and-out, and he kept swaggering about the shop, talking ‘your old man this, your old
man that.’ You should have seen the blacks that were there, enjoying the sight like hell. So I’m trying to steer the guy through
the door when he starts struggling, like I want to beat him up or something, but he just wants to take something out of his
pocket. ‘Look, look,’ he keeps telling me. ‘For old times’ sake you must help me. Your father would be proud… ,’ and he shoves
a picture in my hands, look.”

Ian takes the picture from his pocket and gives it to me.

“It’s a battalion, Lindiwe, my old man’s up front, second from left.”

I find Ian’s father. His face is brutally serious, glaring into the camera. It looks chiseled in stone. It makes me want to
drop the picture. I look up at Ian.

“Yah, he looks like a scary shit all right. Your old man’s there, too, Lindiwe. Look, right at the back there, right at the
end.”

I look at Ian as if he’s talking gibberish, and then I look at the picture and he is right. My father is standing there his
face turned to one side.

“They had Coloreds and Indians serving in some of the white battalions of the Rhodesian Regiment.”

“They were in the same unit, battalion…?” The words seem impossible in my mouth.

“But I… I thought your father was a… a Scout.”

“That’s what he says. Anyways, even if that was true, they used to select the Scouts from the regular regiments, the best
of the crop. Funny how when you think about it, the Selous Scouts were the only fully integrated unit—black, whites, if you
could do the job, you were in, end of story.”

I look down at the picture again.

“You think that’s why he sold the house to my father?”

“What, for old times’ sake you mean?”

I don’t answer him for a while. It’s as if I’m trying to grasp something just out of reach.

“Maybe. I mean, no one else would sell to my dad once they found about Mummy being black. Maybe your father…”

“Had a soft spot? Not happening. He’d have accepted cash from the devil. Your dad must have offered him a good deal, that’s
all.”

“I feel like I’m missing something important, like, I don’t know, it’s crazy, your father and my…”

“Yah, I gave the old drunk some change for the picture, as happy as… you know, I reckon the guy was drinking homegrown brew.”

I look down at my father again, at his head turned to one side. I wonder if he was embarrassed, angry to be there, ashamed.
I look at Ian’s father. At his steely expression and the gun so firm in his hand, and I go over to my father again and look
at how the gun rests in his hands and I think it’s as if he were holding Roxy. The gun doesn’t belong there.

“I need some air, Ian.”

We take a detour to Africa Unity Square. Sitting on the bench looking out at the fountain, Ian beside me, I am brought back
to Ian and me at Centenary Park,
leg wrestling.

On this bench, in this city, Ian takes my hand.

“You’re quiet.”

“I’m shocked. I keep thinking of what my father must be carrying inside himself because of the war. You know, your father
looks like he was meant for war, I don’t…”

“What? You’re right.”

“Daddy, my father, whenever he came back from his call-ups, the first couple of weeks, he would be really talkative, about
anything, you know, as if he was trying to fill up the space… and sometimes when I would wake up in the middle of the night
to get a glass of water, I would find him in the kitchen in the dark, sitting there wide awake.”

“My old man drank. But I reckon he was drinking because he was bored of the home life. He wanted to go back to the bush.”

“Then he would become argumentative. Anything would work on his nerves. The arguments he would have with my mother. He would
accuse her of spending too much money—who was she trying to impress? what was she doing when he was not there?—and you know,
once he actually told her to pack her bags and get out of the house.”

“Did she?”

“Yes. I don’t know where she went, but she was gone for a week. We were living in Thorngrove and Rosanna had just arrived.”

“Picture, picture, for the lovebirds.”

I look up at the young photographer whose hopes have leapt up at the sight of this murungu with his black girlfriend.

“Twenty-four hour delivery,” he says, adjusting his camera.

“No, it’s okay, shamwari. I also take pictures.”

The photographer’s eyes widen at Ian’s accent, his Shona.

“But I will take an excellent one, of you and the pretty lady, shamwari yangu, door-to-door, express delivery.”

I get up from the bench.

“Sorry, my friend, next time,” says Ian. “But you are right, she
is
a pretty lady and I’m a lucky bastard.”

The photographer beams him a smile and wanders off towards the Meikles Hotel to try his luck with the five-star guests.

“I
am
a lucky bastard,” Ian says, bending to kiss me.

We walk along the pavement, and the flower vendors who’ve been sitting about arranging their wares leap into action. They
start gesticulating to Ian and holding out flowers. Ian stops and picks out a bunch of yellow roses.

“Very good choice!” cries the vendor who looks much older than the others.

“Thirty-five dollars. A very good price for you, sir.”

Ian bargains the price right down from thirty-five dollars to eleven dollars (“Look, man, I’m a local. No ways I’m forking
out that much, daylight robbery. Come on, be reasonable now…”) “How very dashing, Ian” is on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow
hard.

I take in the rows and rows of wreaths and crosses: colored tissue paper mounted by wire on polystyrene “kaylite” boards.
The brisk economy of AIDS has swiped away any African taboos and superstitions about selling such items in the open. I wonder
what the foreign businessmen staying across the road make of this when they venture out.

I take the flowers back to the office and arrange them in a chipped jug while Leeann looks on.

“You know,” she says finally, “we’re ordering orchids and long-stemmed roses for the wedding from a
proper
florist, Interflora, no expenses spared.”

Of course not, I think. Not with the groom being a tobacco farmer’s son and the farm having what, two or more lakes, and the
bride’s head filled with ideas of the beauty parlor that she is going to set up on the farmhouse veranda that will bring the
finesses of make-up application and hairdressing to the farmers’ wives stuck out there since: “They don’t have to look so
frumpy. I’ll show them how to apply foundation…”

“And the prawns are waiting in the fridge, you better hurry.”

A one-syllable word starting with
B
flashes red in my head.

“
This is it
. Sikato Bay Camp.” Ian turns round and whistles to David, who’s asleep at the back. “Wake up, my boy. We’ve landed.”

I get out of the car, stretch out my legs. What I wouldn’t give for a nice, firm bed, clean sheets, a duvet, a warm bubble
bath. I look at the dirt clearing before us, the campsite. A few meters back, the ablutions block. There are three tents pitched
and a group unloading from a minivan. I can smell boerewors on a braai.

Ian sniffs.

“Great, huh?”

I look around me, buttoning up my jersey.

Ian’s been building this trip up, going with David to the National Parks office, then off to an odds and ends shop downtown
to get a secondhand tent, army-style sleeping bags, gas cookers, torches, fishing rods. Back to his Boy Scout days. He’s been
showing David how to fit the gas cylinder under the burner; he caught me with my wry smile. “Relax now, wait till you have
to cook on this thing, girl,” he said. He teased me about black chicks and camping, and then he must have remembered my postcards
and his face tightened and he said, “Yah well, it’ll be lekker.”

I don’t know how I can let him know, see, that I’m not comparing him with anyone or keeping tab of things.

I found him this morning, sitting outside on the veranda, putting some pictures away in a cardboard box. When he heard me,
he got up, the box in his hands, kissed me, and asked me what I was doing up so early. I said, “I missed you in my sleep.”
“You’re a poet,” he said. He put the box on the crate we’re using as a side table, and he lifted his T-shirt, that I was wearing,
off me. Later, when I looked, the box was gone.

“Are you sure it’s safe out here, Ian? It looks so open.”

What I mean to say is that I’m cold and would like to get back in the car and go home.

“Man Lindiwe, relax, there’s maybe a rhino or two, tops.”

David wakes up and Ian gets busy working on the tent. One of the men from the minivan comes over.

“Hi mate, need some help?”

“No, cheers, thanks for the offer.”

“We’re setting up a braai. When you’re ready, join us, plenty of beers. We’ve got some kids, the boy can muck around. You
can bring your girl if you want her to keep an eye. Where’s the old lady?”

“What, yah, thanks.”

When he’s left, I look at Ian.

“What?”

“‘The girl,’ Ian, the
girl.
”