In the gently lit and gently winding roads of Cape Town’s southern suburbs, the noise of a woman’s crying moves the air. Between the sprinklers and their silver night time rains, over the polished roof of every vehicle – intermittent – a sobbing like these streets have never heard before.
In the living room she holds and shakes her head as he sits before her on the sofa. He is twelve, almost thirteen years old – and he is crying too, with snot and hangdog eyes. In this house, only the syllables of tears can now be heard. In the armchair, his father sits in soundless unmarked weeping and his older sisters, Gwyneth and Candice, lie afraid and banished – protected maybe from the new discovery today has brought.
Their family name is Van der Merwe and they are Afrikaans; of Dutch descent. They are Christians but tonight God has withdrawn His gaze from their home – as from two other broad and beautiful Cape Town houses, picked out in this city’s net of sparkling lights by nothing – indistinguishable in their loveliness.
‘Wat gaan ons nou doen?’ his ma asks him.
– What are we going to do?
The first words to be uttered in a long time. She seems genuinely to look for an answer in his eyes. But he doesn’t know, he’s a child. It isn’t the question he’d expected. Perhaps he had assumed there would be rules to govern this. He had expected to deliver himself up to them. Like a bottom line, like a safety net, he had imagined judgement.
It began with kindness, he keeps telling them.
The Van der Merwes are blessed. This is one of the few areas of Cape Town secure enough to sleep reasonably well in your bed at night. People look out for each other here, there’s a community. Mitzi feels confident leaving the girls to keep an eye on everything. There’s no real reason for the kids to wander, the pool is here, she can make sure they have most of the things they need for a good weekend. She likes Brad’s friends to come to them rather than vice versa, so that everything’s definitely under control. It isn’t negligence to leave your kids alone in the house when your eldest is seventeen – not when you know the territory and you’ve staked your campaign well.
That’s what people will say though, when the conversations run like sand in the wind around the Van der Merwes’ house, the community will divulge that fact to one another – she wasn’t there. How could she have not been there?
‘Waar was jou susters?’
– Where were your sisters.
His father asks it for the second time, but Bradley will not answer. He looks at the patch of carpet under his feet and holds his sisters’ innocence tightly in mind. Under threat, he has learnt, men shield the women.
‘Dit help nie,’ his mother says of him. ‘Kyk. Kyk…’
– Look… And she raises her hand to his wordlessness as if it were a foreign country.
Bradley continues to cry. He cannot speak, he thinks, until he begins to say sorry, and he cannot begin to say sorry. He is the bridge between this morning and tonight. He is the common factor that pulls these two separate universes into one whole. It was his fault equally.
The night sky is blacker this evening and the stars are a different colour. Fencing is glazed by the streetlamps – and climbed by sweetheart vines – but evil has come in underneath it while the dog slept through.
In the Villiers’ residence, Michael lies on his back and sees the ceiling and sees through the ceiling to a galaxy where there is no gravity and nothing is held down to the ground. The planets he imagines are wastelands and they make your chest ache from the fear of lawless, breathless, endless flight.
He begins to see that there will be a day after today. He begins to understand that all the things on television are real in a way he has not previously conceived of – in that they have smells and cause pain and can make you throw up and do not disappear when you decide to look away. It is not merely what has happened in his life today that frightens Michael Villier. It is not a fear confined to this city. It is the realisation that perhaps there have been other days – maybe many – days of evil in other places – when the sun came up again and no great change occurred.
It was forecasted to reach twenty nine degrees. Good Hope FM woke them up: It’s all good! Twenty nine degrees of luck in Michael Villier’s life, under this Saturday sky.
Cape Town looked out at the morning. On almost every side of this most southern city, the ocean lies. You can feel the edge of the world from here: in the penguins that sit on Boulders Beach, in the screen glass of every bold sea view, in the politics of people walking down the street. The houses that flank Table Mountain are smiling, the shade over the stoep is cool and every pastel colour gives a piece of summertime. Once called the Cape Of Storms, this peninsula has been renamed.
Traffic moves in shining rivers through the city’s hands: white cars follow white cars and white drivers tan down one arm. Though palm trees are not native here, they flourish. The blue gums – also introduced – hang lank and silver in the long, long heat, drinking a disproportionate volume from the Cape Town water table. There are restrictions in the city now, though the agapanthus blooms on both sides of the road.
Michael loves it here. His father says that Cape Town’s potential is massive – they moved here to help VDM Victorian Steel Fencing capitalise on the growing security market. And Michael can see it: potential. You’d have to be blind to look at this city and not see your own fortune. He’s only twelve but already he’s decided he’ll never leave. South Africa is paradise.
He’s made friends here and so has his mother. They like how she tells them that in England all these wild-spreading flowers are houseplants, kept in pots inside. And his friends like pretty much everything he has to say. Let’s face it – in comparison to them Michael Villier rules the planet. They’ve never been anywhere. He could lie about other places and they wouldn’t even know.
Michael Villier is an only child, something that makes him both happy and sad. His parents – Joy, nee Partington, and Jonathan – have exchanged the known world for a new house and a second chance. Upper Street made them unhappy. Here, problems seem to lie quieter and remain peripheral to Michael’s life.
He hasn’t started school yet, though they’ve been here for four months. In another six weeks his first term will begin but by now he’s had a chance to adjust. He’s found himself a peer group. There’s a whole gang of them but he and Bradley are the most organised and the best friends. Brad is three weeks older than him.
It’s cool that the sons can be close, like the fathers have always been – something that both Bradley and Michael are proud of. Then there’s the Steenkamp boys, Jacobus and Ferdi – their father used to be a judge. The four of them have been spending every weekend together. Michael’s never had it before.
Bradley’s asked about London. He was born and brought up in Hout Bay – the Van der Merwes have a yacht so he’s never been abroad. But Michael can’t describe how grey it is, or how London seems to fill up the whole world. It’s like no one’s ever wrong there he thinks.
Their new house is larger. It stands in Leicester Drive, where the oak trees runkle the pavement. They also have a pool. It doesn’t feel like home to Michael yet though. They have this amazing garden and a double garage and flowers over the front door, that they have to tie up to stop the trailers touching the electric fence. They had a burglar alarm in England of course, but Africa is a different place.
That morning, with Michael at the Van der Merwes and Jonathan dedicating another weekend to VDM Victorian Steel Fencing, Number 29 Leicester Drive remained silent.
Nine am or so.
Joy Villier stood on her bedroom balcony, staring down over the view as if still in translation, a can of Doom forgotten in one hand. This would be the sixteenth week of her new life. Behind her, each room of the house lay non-responsive in its own mood. There was nothing left to unpack.
They’d shipped one container’s worth of possessions, these were the books that lined the dust free shelves and the clothes that filled the mirrored wardrobes. Everything else was new. The teapot was new. Her sampler – Joy To The World! – hung against a tiled wall as it had never done in eighteen years of existence. The house disregarded her with its newness on every windowsill.
Outside, the carefully apportioned street echoed for anybody’s voice. Hibiscus blooms and high white walls.
Joy’s gaze perused the careful signage, the post boxes, the shifting focus of sun through shadowed leaves. She paused in her breath – and the street below, with its many gates and peaceful driveways, paused alongside.
Now she has seen the place the swallows come to. She is approaching the realisation that this – right here – is all she’ll ever be. At thirty five years old, she is still beautiful. It’s just that familiarity breeds contempt.
Standing in her wardrobe, five minutes’ drive away from the Villiers’, Mitzi Van der Merwe placed her fingers between the hangers and, with appetising clicks, sent her choices of outfit from maybe to no. Hennie gone on VDM business to Port Elizabeth, she and Joy would be in Stellenbosch until tomorrow night. The two of them have spent a great deal of time together over the past few months, though this doesn’t mean their situations are comparable.
As Mitzi touched the collar of her cream blouse and heard, in a tone muted by their home’s deep-pile carpets, the distant ringing of a mobile phone, Gwyneth and Candice slept on in their separate bedrooms – their weekend plans still dormant, their blinds drawn, their father gone, their breathing soft as shade.
In the playroom down the hall, the boys had turned on MTV and lay in duvets, sun cast in dust across the screen, the best weekend of the summer beginning in style.
‘The thing about Britney is that underneath she’s not that pretty? Actually she’s quite ugly,’ Michael was going to them, flicking away from her past the news and the weird fake SA soap operas where all the sets look like they’re two dimensional.
Brad was fixed watching over Kobus’ shoulder though, at some picture on his phone, and saying Bru… and Yeah-rrrr… and other Afrikaans shit.
‘Actually she’s mad. She’s like a mad fucking minger in real life,’ and rolling on his back he took in the wide blonde squares of Cape Town sun across the ceiling. ‘Fuck me Gwynnie, fuck me Gwynnie.’
Brad beckoned him. ‘Come check this bru.’
But Michael only takes that blonde sun in.
‘It’s actually, eating his leg.’
The two women prepared their bags in separate halls. There in the Van der Merwes: on the rug beside the doorway to the kitchen which, in the sleek shade far from the playroom, rang with the maid Selena’s homely washing sounds. And in the Villiers’, quiet enough to hear the hand shears in the next-door neighbour’s garden: Joy’s weekend case, solo on the white tiled floor. Waiting for Mitzi to say her goodbyes at her own home and arrive here – Mitzi would be driving – Joy drank orange and pomegranate juice beside the fridge.
It isn’t unusual for the boys to be left in Brad’s sisters’ care – though never overnight before. If you’d put the four of them together in London, Michael’s said, there’s no way they would’ve stayed in. Not that London isn’t dangerous, because there’s been a lot of stabbings recently, but that’s just a scatter of crime in comparison to SA. In the first week after they arrived here, with all their England things in boxes still, Michael’s parents had sat him down for the Africa talk.
If you’d said to him in London that he wasn’t allowed to go outside on his own he probably would have gone mad, but here the size of the view is almost enough on its own – plus there’s something about the way that the danger isn’t obvious that weirds you out more. Most of the streets look easily safe enough to walk around. Because of the disparity between rich and poor in Africa, criminals will do anything to you. You can’t use public transport, it’s too dangerous. You can’t walk by the townships if you’re white, you’ll be killed. Michael isn’t a racist – using racist names is one of the few things that he and Brad have crossed words over, and Brad did back down – but racism has a different reason in Africa. They knew black people in England of course, but in England there’s no threat that they’re going to murder you.
You hear a lot of stories here. In one of them, a man breaks his leg falling off a ladder, an ambulance is called for him and he’s rushed away. When he wakes up though he isn’t in hospital, he’s by the side of the road at night. Just lying there alone and robbed and lost and Michael’s even heard it told a different way. In the second version, he wakes up halfway through being raped.
At first, when Michael told people how much he liked it here, this sort of story was the response that came, but now he tells them himself. Brad’s cousin was robbed three weeks ago, just driving in his car. They had a gun.
‘Things might look so safe here they’re boring,’ his dad had prompted, all three of them sitting together in the living room that night. And Michael had thought of the palm tree filled park at the far end of Leicester Drive, a ten minute walk that would be nothing to him back home. ‘The reality, is something you can’t see, not immediately.’
Their expressions had been careful, his mother giving dissatisfied sounds in the middle of her sentences, passing the onus of the conversation back and forth. Michael had watched them and tried to give some reassurance.
‘It’s like insects in a flower, you know? You have to inspect things to see,’ she’d said.
And Michael had noticed, in that park in fact: round the large sunny lake, between the folds of lawn, lone figures wandering. Sitting between his parents, the sudden dark outside that comes in South Africa’s evenings, he’d seen the way they dipped their toes in this new country.
Good Hope FM woke them up every day though and began uninstructed in his mum’s new Opal. Outside of town, the radio station’s billboards displayed the finest pair of tits ever photographed – not naked of course but in a bikini – and underneath them in curly letters ran the slogan that’s still true.
It’s all good.
In some ways, if Michael’s honest, he doesn’t mind the danger. For a start, VDM Victorian Steel Fencing would be pretty fucked without it, ironically, and they probably wouldn’t even have moved to SA – but also he’s not the same person here as he was back home. He’s already easily done things Brad and the others won’t be able to do until they’re eighteen. And even though he won’t either now, he’s got the memories. They’re already part of who he is and moving here can’t take them away from him – it just makes him appreciate them through other people’s eyes.
Here it’s spring in November. His parents are planning their first Christmas on the beach. Already they’ve started selling trees on some street corners, under shade cloths to keep the sun’s heat off the needles. These are the things that make South Africa amazing – it’s like they built England on Mars. They have Maccy D’s and they have Burger King, even Woolworths, which is more like Harrods here. The quality things are much more special in SA, because of the disparity. In Britain, as he’s told his friends, everybody has them these days.
‘People take out their phones on the Tube all the time,’ he’d told Brad. He’d explained to him about the London Underground: how men and women and children had hidden down in the stations in the Second World War. ‘I’d even use my laptop there.’
‘Is it,’ Brad had gone – which wasn’t always a question here.
Brad’s no pussy. Michael saw him jump from the top ledge at Crystal Pools and his breath had dried up as Brad’s body had slipped through the seconds before the water. At the end of last term some kid had called him a coward and Brad had gone apeshit, had hit him for it – for weeks now he’s been suffering the consequences. But he’d never been on a train.
You saw the black people and the coloured people – the Cape Coloureds, they were called – walking along beside you as you drove into the city proper, or on any other road. The blacks walked with their babies tied by towels onto their backs, or with their bags of shopping balanced on their heads, just like some tribe on television but in the modern world.
Ferdi Steenkamp knew a lot about them – from the Discovery Channel but also because Mr Steenkamp had been a judge for so long. He’d been talking when they were driving down to the Waterfront Mall recently. ‘Some of them have never even ridden in cars,’ he’d gone, pointing to a family, seven or eight of them, walking on an ordinary timetable down the edge of the motorway. Michael had watched their figures falling one by one away.
‘Until they get in yours,’ Brad had returned, his eyes caught on the far off harbour, where military ships were anchored, silent and grey in the panorama of Cape Town’s coastal blue.
There’d been a lot of building in the city in the last ten years. All the towers were new – the ABSA bank and the Standard Bank’s cluster, the Hilton. Murals for peace ran along the walls that hemmed the townships and millions of products bore the logo Proudly South African. Because of the careful attitude of Nelson Mandela and the government, this was not Zimbabwe, Michael’s father said. But neither was it England. Michael had wanted to ask why there were more poor people in SA than Britain, but he was a straight A student it seemed like the sort of thing that should have been obvious to him.
‘How many of them robbed your cousin again?’ he’d asked Brad as the car crested Table Bay.
South Africa is the reality of the world. If you can’t live with it then you’re living in denial. Here Michael’s mother mustn’t walk on her own at night, they drive with the car locked up and even when they’re in the house the cage doors must be closed. People want what we have, his father says.
It’s the sort of thing that Jonathan Villier has to understand now. He’s worked in IT security for years but in a few weeks’ time, the code he wrote will be protecting families as well as businesses. Soon VDM Victorian Steel Fencing will relaunch as VVDM Security. They’re not going to lose the tagline though. The Beauty of Security has been a very successful catchphrase for Hendrik and Michael knows exactly what it means. It’s a really good feeling to know that everything is safe.
Mitzi Van der Merwe completed the last of her leaving routines, entrusting her indoor sandals to their place beneath the bedside table and turning all the photographs on it face-side down. Now many years older than when she’d first devised this ritual – one of the numerous small, successful personal tools that other people’s close-mindedness prevented her from passing on – it brought her as much peace of mind as ever. These were the little ways we could help ourselves. It was clearly something to bring on a sense of loneliness, your loved-ones staring for a period of days at a room that was empty of you. So often people were at the mercy of feelings that seemed ephemeral when in fact, like that touch of melancholy upon returning to see their faces, they were brought on by specific things.
Her painted toes naked in the fitted carpet, she tapped first on Candice’s door. The rooms of both her daughters spoke volumes; Candice’s daintily accented with little things she’d saved up for herself, a set of chimes bearing tiny malachite pendants, a carved native-art mirror, the first touches of the life that lay broad and unknowable beyond the last few months that she was here.
Candice rolled over in the flattering shadow as Mitzi went gently to sit on the edge of her bed.
‘Goeie morê my liefling, slaap koppie.’
Candice is almost eighteen, the eldest daughter by one and a half years, and has been accepted to study for a degree in Afrikaans Literature at Stellenbosch. She is a naturally beautiful Afrikaner girl, needing no makeup, blue eyed, golden haired, imbued with seventeen summers.
Disturbed in her own room, she still smiled in patience, indulging her mother’s fussing despite the brevity of the coming trip. Pushing herself up, the halfmoons of her shoulders jutted above the duvet cover. Her room smelled of incense, but Mitzi could also indulge her.
‘Oppad, Ma?’
‘Ja, ek’s nou reg.’
A mother loves all her children but the first is always special. Mitzi has hopes: she hopes that Gwyneth will gain new inspiration from the stories that Candice will bring back in her holidays.
Instead of opening Candice’s cream curtains, she brushed the fall of hair behind her daughter’s ear as they began to recap on the duties of the coming hours.
Gwynnie’s bedroom bore a scent that she knew was marijuana, lingering in the tiny spaces between her strewn cosmetics, notes-to-self, loose change, forsaken clothes. It was not a smell that Mitzi had knowingly encountered, even in her own university days, but it was dagga.
This was the difference between her daughters’ attitudes toward her, not just their life choices. As much as Candice’s smiles were tolerant reflections of her own, she could feel Gwyneth’s disdain in this protracted smell, which she believed her mother ignorant of. As always in here, Mitzi avoided looking at any surrounding details while, kissing Gwyneth’s cheek, she proceeded to relay the same commands.
Mitzi’s second daughter was also exceptionally beautiful but Gwyneth’s beauty had a connotation, Mitzi had always seen. Even as a child she’d been more aware of, more interested in her attractiveness than Candice. Gwyneth had needed to be beautiful from an early age in order to take advantage of what it offered her.
Sitting there beside her, while the room was highlighted by the periodic flashing of Gwyn’s phone in the corner, Mitzi spoke with quiet iron entreaty: there would be no boyfriends here, there would be no alcohol, no illegal substances, there would be no loud music. And regularly she found herself – as was often the case unfortunately – distracted by how lovely Gwyneth was. It was extremely difficult not to be taken in by those large grey sleepy eyes and that perfect little pout. And actually Mitzi didn’t blame her – though her opinion made no difference to the image that Gwyneth portrayed in fact – but the girls’ looks had come from somewhere and though she’d never have chosen to use it like Gwyn, Mitzi was not oblivious to the factors of that temptation.
She said goodbye to the boys, stood on the threshold of the playroom doorway, Brad sitting in the middle of them – her third blonde child, her only boy, resplendent in the full sun. She blew a kiss at him and he winced, too old to enjoy it but not quite old enough to disregard its reality.
The weekend was a gift for Brad; a reward and a responsibility. He’d behaved impeccably since the holidays had begun. She’d stood in the office with Mevrou Vorsloo at Constantia Waldorf and passed no comment of her own that day. But his silent acquiescence to the penalty programme she’d implemented since is ample evidence of what she’d known: that he isn’t a boy whose pride needs reigning in, only channelling. She’d overseen his apology to the kid – Sandile – her fingers uncurling with the checked reflex to take his hand.
Mitzi is a woman who lives for her children and has been rewarded in almost every way. As she would tell Joy this weekend – for it was something Joy needed to be made aware of – she’d recently been asked by Michael why she believed in God. She’d just been glad in that moment that she’d already spent time considering such an answer, though her own children had faith and would never ask.
I believe in God, she’d been able to tell Michael with honesty and passion, because He’s given me my kids.
Tall already, sandy haired and broad jawed, Brad is beautiful, even Michael would have to admit. His eyes are just like Hendrik’s, that surprising blue, but with no compromise.
Michael’s asked him what he wants to be, but the question lacks a straightforward pathway here. Bradley’s father was trained as a lawyer before he became an entrepreneur.
‘Lawyers don’t make that much money,’ Bradley said to him once.
‘Fuck money,’ Michael told him.
But this is the deal he struck with Gwyneth and Candice last night:
Bradley’s sisters are rad for two main reasons. One, they’re probably the most beautiful girls Michael’s ever seen and two, they listen to Trance music. They go to Trance parties, with massive multi-coloured aliens for stages and swimming pools on the dance floor and firework displays, and have shown Michael and Kobus and Brad the photographs. Today for example they want to go to the second half of The Alien Safari Festival, where they are completely not allowed to be.
Through the doorway last night, Michael watched Brad haggle with them, his voice hushed despite the fact that his parents were in a totally different bit of the house. Michael hadn’t been able to understand what they were saying but he’d seen Brad’s face and the cash that both girls handed over. Brad had licked his fingers between each note. He had this vendetta system going with Gwyneth.
After making the deal, Brad had proceeded to fuck the rest of them in rotation on Need for Speed, the cash stacked neatly on top of the PS3. Four hundred Rand. Two hundred from each sister. In British money, the equivalent of almost forty pounds.
Ferdi had passed out at two am, Kobus by three.
‘They’ll drive past the cameras,’ Michael had commented. VVDM was trialling on the Van der Merwes’ property now, though the door to Candice’s garage usually stood closed. With the new system you could log in from anywhere. When they started rolling it out, it was going to be a basic game changer.
‘Maybe we’ll just call that a down payment hey,’ Brad had answered quietly, not glancing away from the screen.
‘Better stash it,’ Michael had said. He’d been ready to crash himself by then.
Brad had shown no signs of sleep though. ‘Entrepreneur’s in the genes, eh my friend,’ he’d said. ‘It’s in the fokken genes,’ he’d repeated in song, the Bugatti slicing up another lap in front of his eyes.
His sisters have decided to wear short skirts. Sometimes they do not wear short skirts, sometimes they wear long skirts, or jeans, sometimes cut off denim shorts, which are also an excellent choice, but today they have decided on short skirts. Gwyneth’s is red with a redder trim.
Bradley remains seated and Candice has to walk across the room and then lean over in order to give him her mobile phone. Candice’s skirt is a variety of greens. Beside Brad, Kobus fingers his lip hairs. Lying on his stomach, he pretends to continue watching the TV’s murder mystery, but each lip hair gets a good going over. He only has four, but those are four well looked after lip hairs.
Candice places the mobile into Bradley’s flat and waiting palm. They will leave the boys with it until tomorrow morning, so there’ll be no excuses about battery power or reception. She’ll call from Gwyneth’s phone every two hours, day and night. If the boys don’t answer – even once – then she’ll drive home.
‘Dis vol gecharge,’ she says in warning. ‘It works everywhere in the house, né, in every corner of the house understand? You go shit, you take the phone. Lief vir jou né?’ she tells him.
‘I go shit I take the phone,’ Brad replies.
On the television, there’s a lengthy flexible scream as a brunette woman descends from her balcony. The smile Brad gives her is placid and it eats everything.
‘I’ve seen this one,’ Ferdi Steenkamp volunteers, his arms wrapped around his knees in the pitiless yellow beanbag that’s resting no more than a foot from the screen. For all the occasions they’ve been in the same room at the same time, Michael hasn’t once seen Ferdi meet either of Brad’s sisters’ eyes, despite the fact that he’s been thirteen over six months now. A few weeks ago, Brad had dared him fifty Rand. ‘It’s her husband who did it,’ he continues. ‘He’s having an affair with the secretary in real life. He’s standing behind her now. You’ll get the flashback at the end.’
Ferdi Steenkamp has a good heart but often gets confused about when and for how long he should speak. Their mother’s taking him to a lot of doctors at the moment to see if it’s some kind of syndrome. His face is long and reminds Michael of the donkey who carried Mary to Bethlehem, only to get dumped outside in favour of all the baby lambs.
Kobus blinks his long, dark, pretty lashes at the brother with which the universe has seen fit to afford him. The younger Steenkamp is not a lamb, though he does have very creamy white skin. Leaning forward to take the remote wordlessly from Michael’s hand, with one straight arm, he switches channels.
A lion cub is being fed by a fat game reserve attendant woman.
A little black kid’s trying to eat breakfast in a multicoloured kitchen that keeps pushing him around.
In white, with masks on, three doctors try to revive someone, but they fail.
After a moment Candice puts her sunglasses on. In the doorway, Gwyn’s already wearing hers. Brad’s surrounded by women, Michael thinks; all day long, all night.
‘Lief vir jou,’ Candice tells him.
The Villiers’ doorbell is a subtle touch, harmonious and polyphonic.
Mitzi makes an effort to kiss Joy affectionately, holding her upper arms with a show of determined belief in – and excitement for – the next twenty four hours.
‘I must just go pee pee now first. You’ll want to do the same or you’ll end up sitting in it by the time we’re there.’
To which thoughtfulness Joy could only respond with assent. It never failed to surprise her – this combination of potent Christian decorum and unabashed crudeness on which Afrikaner ladies had grown so strong. For a woman who’d spent many years fighting Christian etiquette with her own homegrown crudenesses, it made for a wry landing.
Their cases set together in the trunk of Mitzi’s car, as she waited for Mitzi’s return from the bathroom, from the settee Joy looked out at her new garden.
This year – now nearly passed – is the first that has seen South Africa’s rainfall fail, at least in the memory of anyone who comments. Though not noticeable yet, especially not to foreign eyes, one by one the bore hole supplies across the country were slowly growing drier. On their lawn, as across every other, the grass is of a special kind that Joy does not recognise; though greener than an English lawn, it’s markedly less thirsty. This is not something that could be said of Joy herself. Recently transplanted, she still needs watering in. It is not yet eleven thirty and her second glass of juice has met the Absolut.
She watches the gardener moving back and forth lackadaisically. No. Alteration: the gardener has been watching her. She isn’t sure with the way the reflections lie across the glass but every three or four minutes his head turns to allow him a view which could reach into the interior.
He is black, she thinks, not coloured. The ‘coloured’ people have more slanted eyes and came, Jonathan said, from Malaysia as indentured labour. This black man’s body is young and muscular and in front of the glass he lets his spray fall far and wide. On the doorstep one morning just after they had first arrived, he’d begged them for work. Now she pays him one hundred Rand, which is perhaps the equivalent of seven pounds a day. That’s quite generous here though. He’d been grateful, when she made that offer.
Joy feels no excitement for, or belief in, the next twenty four hours. Instead it is a weighted sensation not dissimilar to indigestion, a little tidal drag in her guts that she feels – of the kind caused by many things these days, or by many things here, whichever.
To her left, the bathroom door opens and she watches Mitzi emerge onto the tiles between the indoor ferns. Why did all the surfaces in hot countries need to be wipe-clean? In a simple black skirt and white jersey, really she is absolutely elegant – and fills Joy with a sense of dread, for Joy has seen her pillbox.
The front garden’s sun engulfs them. As they seat themselves in their respective places behind the windscreen, Joy activates the electronic double gates that stand, night and day, between her new home and the place in which it’s situated.
There is the mountain – which their route hugs and straddles and finally separates from – a behemoth of greenery amidst the conurbation. There is the network of broad and enviable roads. The frequency of little nineties’ Golf Citis. The grand and green liquart trees – they have peeling bark, but their leaves look to Joy like a London Plane’s.
In just three years, Heat magazine will declare this city the number one international tourist destination, but for now this accolade remains unattained. Around the Waterfront Mall in the central business district, the vehicles stand in metal gleaming lines: Nissan, Toyota, Datsun, dwarfed by the mall’s vast and sunlight covered glass as it holds the air conditioning and the day apart.
Across the rooftops, morning temperatures are building; in the well of each wide street. Weekend-spenders travel to every bay to crowd the sand and look out – whichever ocean. International tourists throng the shaded edges of Greenmarket Square and, in the botanical gardens, rest red feet. Planning regulations have kept this city beautiful. On the higher slopes of Table Mountain, no building may rise above two storeys and any extension of the residential areas there – Vredehoek and Buidenkant, smooth swathes of cottages, veranda-trimmed – is now forbidden.
There’s always the mountain, amidst the whole peninsula’s conurbation, measuring the distance before you as you enter Cape Town, or that by which you leave it behind.
If you hauled over onto your side in the playroom, you saw it couched behind the rows of sleepy houses – the edifice of Africa’s true plateau. Wherever you went, you could find your way by it, though the suburb’s roads wound unexpected routes. There was little to Constantia but residential streets like Leicester Drive.