Cruel Crazy Beautiful World (22 page)

Words elude Zero. He realises he may have to revise his view of the pigs.

He turns on the radio again:

RADIO
: ... swamped Sumatra and the Nicobar Islands and ravaged Pondicherry. The tsunami is now heading for Malindi on the east coast of Africa ...

A good thing Zimbabwe’s so far from the sea, thinks Jabulani. This is one risk in an otherwise lawless land that Thokozile and Panganai and Tendai are spared.

RADIO
: And in Dhaka the cricket game between India and Bangladesh goes on despite the tsunami.

– At the end of the day, Freedom, even if half the world sinks into the sea, folk will go on playing cricket.

– Since they are not dead.

– That’s the truth, brother. And by the way, all the money from this dope goes to you. To get your folk out.

Jabulani stares out at the alien, yellow veld and thinks:
Angels come in the strangest forms.

B
OXING DAY, 26 DECEMBER
2004. Hermanus. Dusk.

Vertigo blooms in my head. A gust taunts me. My toes jut out over the void.

The tide will tug my corpse off the fanged reef of rocks below. Sharks will filch snatches of my skin and crayfish pick tatters off my bones as they jig and clink among the shells and stones of this whale-song sea.

Lotte will trawl the market for word of me. Yet how am I to go on in a world where my love for her is hung out to dry like fish on the salting poles?

Another gust floats a line of song sung by the urchin opera-boys singing for pennies. My hands fly out to catch the foreign words fluttering like sparrows over my head.

A whale blows in the distant deep. I hope to see the outline of the tail but the whale stays under.

I feel deserted. I see no hope.

Then I fall and the wind howls her mad opera in my ears.

Dassies
eye me incuriously from cracks in the cliff.

I see Lotte wing by, her angel wings whistling in fight.

I call out to her, yet she, cool and alien, is focused on the flaming horizon.

Below me a freak wave flash-floods over the rocks. Cormorants shoot skyward like jagged shrapnel.

I feel a sharp sting under the soles of my feet. Now I’m tumble-turning underwater, glancing off rock, seeking the sky. I have no sense of north or south. The sea shouts in my ears.

My mind goes blank. Then I see the bare tits of that whore in Amsterdam. She tugs my head into the clammy hollow between them. I wriggle hard but she won’t let me go. Zero laughs.

A sun-flared film unreels in my head: My sister and mother skip through water fanned by my thumb jammed into a hosepipe. Zero plays a frenzied salsa rhythm on his old guitar, as Cuban bands will till a girl’s skirt falls off. They flash smiling teeth at me, cuttlefish white. And my sister is unaware she’ll die tomorrow.

Am I now dead, I wonder?

But then I bob up and founder like an oil-lamed seagull on the raging surface.

Just as a wave wants to dash my skull against the harbour wall, a rip tide yanks me out to deep sea again.

I see the professor and his dog high on the harbour slipway. His fishing boat has been flipped over and is bobbing keel-down in the harbour.

Now the professor casts out his line of tatty string, a tennis ball tied to the end.

The ball eludes me. I go under again.

Now I see a myriad-handed Lotte dancing blue-skinned and lolling-tongued on my corpse.

And Buyu: jumping up and down on a jetty alongside a band of stray dogs capering on their hind feet, caterwauling one and all to the moon.

I surface again and catch hold of the ball. The professor reels me in, hand over hand.

On the slipway where they used to land and gut whales I feel Moonfleet lick salt and blood from my flayed skin.

In my mouth there’s a salty taste of shame that I’d abandon my mother marooned and uncured and Hunter so dry and wistful and Buyu all agog and zingy.

And yet I wish a rock had ended this futile longing for Lotte, ended too all recall of the police Polaroids I found in Zero’s drawer: of my sister’s skin overexposed and clawed on a dune, of her hands cat’s-cradled with baling wire.

The world spins. I shut my eyes.

Thumbs slide my eyelids up. The professor hovers over me. He surveys the sorry flotsam at his feet and shakes his head. Perhaps he thinks:
Was it for this that I twined and twiddled my string for so long?

Then he gazes at the sea that took his love yet so whimsically spared me.

From the cliff high above us the hunchback blows his
vuvuzela
: a long, gutting, haunting song of love for this cruel crazy beautiful south.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 2011 by Troy Blacklaws

978-1-4804-1003-9

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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