2.
So Bradley van der Merwe sits crosslegged on the floor, listening to how his home sounds clean of adults. A hot December Saturday like he’s never seen before. His friends’ voices clatter on across the tiles.
‘You ready?’
‘I’m not watching the one with the horse again.’
Kobus Steenkamp’s ten gig drive is an eye watering, puke inducing, multilingual, hardcore filth marathon.
‘That’s not hot. That’s just weird.’ Michael is leaning back on his elbows. Everything about him is English –but not in the verkrampte way Brad would have imagined once upon a time. Soutpiel – salt dick – a leg either side of the ocean and his dick hanging down in the sea.
‘Ja well it’s not all on there because it’s hot in any case.’
Out in the garden, a tarentaal sounds its violent call.
A hot December Saturday, free to run into the night. Brad has the four hundred Rand in his jeans pocket, folded till it’s spring-loaded. There are several secret places in his room, but the idea of consigning it to any of them fills him with a blunt wrong – an obstacle course of unanswered questions. Through the windows, the bird’s staccato noise falls again. A lot of cash, by Michael’s standards as well as his own – he could see that on his face last night. But he can’t spend it. And that was just as visible under the PS3’s flickering lights. He’d asked Michael what he’d do with the money if it was his and Michael had failed to answer him.
It’s almost like it stops being money if you can’t spend it. He wants to lay it down on some counter and hear the till talk acceptance. What is it if you can’t spend it? It’s a joke.
On the lawn, Brad sees the tarentaal. Picking its careful way around the flowerbeds, its fat body sways through the bands of sun and shadow cast by the fencing’s highest bars. It looks up and checks what must be blank glass to its eyes.
The N2 carries Bradley’s sisters up Sir Lowry’s Pass, a world of tumbling rocks and precipitous valleys that slip past Gwyneth’s gaze and leave her cold. They drive fast, her hand out of the window riding the waves in the growing force of the wind.
The world moves past her soundtracked and at speed. One of the things to live for really is to drive and listen to psychedelic trance music and smoke a joint. They aren’t alike, her and her sister. Candice believes she’s searching for a better way of life – thinks her horizons are broad – but Africa’s a big place and can deceive you in that way. Gwynnie isn’t looking for anything. Drugs are what tickle her only taste bud.
She likes particularly ecstasy and LSD together. In combination, she can get to a stage where it feels like she’s underwater. Even moving your hand is clever then. She can’t go through a party without tikking a bit, meth is the most evil thing on the planet. She loves alcohol. Sometimes when she drinks, it’s as if she can feel herself growing smaller. She drives headlong towards the moment when she’ll disappear. Pop! The only thing that wakes her up well is psychedelic trance.
She likes laughing gas – balloon after balloon until the universe goes purple and all the figures are dancing without sound. Likes cocaine sure but she loves qat. The single time she’s taken ketamine, she found it best of all. Sick horses must be happy all day long.
There’s no clear reason for her to be miserable, her future is full of whites and sea blues and makes her loathe the full colour spectrum. It’s occurred to her that her life is the best the world can offer and this has made her hate the world.
Somewhere in the midst of the rolling farmland, twenty minutes from the city and five from the motorway, the Alien Safari is into its second day.
They see the handmade sign and make the turn.
Beside the river, which has banks of white sand, next to a woodland which on Monday morning will be picked clean again, two thousand people are at play in the strewn debris of their own entertainment. Between them, like small boats drifting, the coloured farmhands move with rubbish bags.
Brad says, ‘Ek gaan’n bietjie loop.’
Kobus comes to a halt on the menu screen.
‘I think I’ll spend my money eh.’
A brief hiatus falls, which needs no translation: a new hole in the promise of their Saturday.
‘It’s mine.’
In the big yellow flower of beanbag, Ferdi goes, ‘Like there’s niks you need to be going out for Brad. Like it’s sick right here, everything we want we have - ’
Kobus’ voice is disdainful. In one of the white stiff-collared shirts he favours, tipping his head back to look through those long-lashes, ‘Order pizza.’
‘I don’t want pizza.’
‘Jy’s fokken wacko. You can’t go out. There’s lank criminals and dangers. Not fokken London here.’
‘Sure tune me. There’s lank criminals and dangers,’ Brad gives him his Ouma’s voice, makes a spas kung-fu move. ‘I’ll just Jackie Chan them.’
‘I’m not the fok following you round and get murdered and ass raped,’ Kobus answers him quietly. ‘You think you’re going, what, nice little walk about? Malfunction.’
‘Did I tell you come?’
Michael absorbs Brad’s expression. He’s completely serious. And what Michael remembers is the time Brad took his wallet, slipped it out of his trouser pocket, analysing and jettisoning its contents piece by piece. Watching him turn the Oyster card between his fingers, Michael had explained what Londoners used them for. In the grass around Brad’s long tanned legs had lain Michael’s HSBC card and a pigeon feather rescued from the road in Angel.
‘The cameras’ll watch you walk right out the gates. Anyone checks it.’ Though Hendrik would be travelling now. Likewise Mitzi and his mum.
Brad looks at him and sitting back pulls the notes from his trouser pocket, flattening them out on one knee. ‘Anyone who wants to come can have one eh.’ He peels, rolls and propels one into the air towards the gap between Michael’s knees. ‘Jacobus?’
‘I don’t need jou fokken money bru.’
‘Good. I get halfway down the street, you gaan piss down your own leg. Mikey.’ Mikey is what Brad always calls him. Maatjie. Friend. Michael sits forward slowly, pulling first one hand then the other from the floor behind him, leaving the note beneath his knees where it lies still unfurling.
‘You want to take a drink with? What’s in your fridge?’ And he does see something more familiar enter Bradley’s eyes.
‘Fok julle twee,’ Kobus says shallowly. ‘Eh? Fok you both.’
And Ferdi looks round the three of them like soon normality will start picking up the slack and cease to make challenges out of things that don’t have to be.
Psychedelic trance music is tribal. It connects with the very deepest parts of people. Candice says it frees them. She is concerned with freedom.
Your focus narrows. Candice and Gwyneth will sit with the tik pipe between them, eyes meeting over its delicate bowl. With one glance, they’ll tell each other everything. You have the music – and this is what the music’s for, to take away the world and leave you clear. They will stand up. They’ll move through the crowd to a place where the bass line adds extra molecules to the air. Surrounded by friends, they will surrender themselves to what makes them happiest, they will dance – Candice with her arms outstretched to be embraced by the world, Gwyneth with her head shaking and her thoughts diffuse – their pale skin turning red under the sun.
Mitzi drove Joy down the lengthening road. Century City loomed and receded while the urban landscape flattened, Radio Sonder Grense murmuring in Afrikaans underneath Mitzi’s own bright voice. She talked about Zimbabwe, as everyone was doing now, while Ratanga Junction’s roller coasters revealed their backbones above its distant wall.
‘You know it used to be more productive than here even, I went, it was beautiful, it was beautiful. And now of course they’re flocking in and there’s nothing they can do, it’s a tidal wave. But it’s a terrible thing. And the blacks here don’t like them because they’re taking the work and they’re different tribes and they’re still governed by that thinking. There’s violence now because of it, here. In tidal waves they’re coming. Shame but there’s just nothing there, nothing in the shops.’ Mitzi shook her head with the sad confirmation of what she’d expected a very long time ago.
Joy pictured teenagers screaming. An entire trainload of them, arms aloft in a Mexican wave.
A twine of intersections hedged Cape Town’s northern border; arcs of concrete that spanned the blue sky and cradled the N1 as it opened to funnel traffic away from the city.
The cars streamed smoothly through the heat and Joy’s hands lay sweaty, interlaced. Perhaps one black driver for every ten white she counted. They rode, the African men, in crowds on the backs of pickup trucks. Mornings you’d see them waiting in line for work, on the corners, at the bus stops every day.
Mitzi’s fingernails assumed a fan in the air, just proud of the shining wheel. ‘But what did they expect?’
Unsure as to whether this question required an answer, which maybe she wasn’t qualified to give, Joy remained silent. She thought of how Michael would excitedly pack his bag before leaving on daytrips now, how he’d begun to wake up.
She didn’t believe anything irrevocable had played out over the last two years, but there had been points when discussions with his teacher at Dallington had taken place. A general reticence, a mistrust that had crept across him, filtering the connection between his grey-brown eyes and the world. But he’d begun to wake up – the change had been noticeable almost as soon as they’d arrived. He believed in their fresh start and, on balance, felt that he could make his own.
‘Oh and it was so green, the beautiful farms,’ Mitzi continued. She raised those fingers spread from the wheel, to indicate the world that they passed through, and released breath.
‘But it’s not like Zimbabwe here,’ Joy finally said, to which Mitzi only turned her head with a levelled stare.
Watching her companion conscientiously check each of her mirrors as she indicated to overtake, Joy employed a tactic that was supposed to make it humorous. She thought of the syllables that constituted the name Cecil Rhodes, turned them in silence around her tongue and tasted their quintessentially English flavour.
Since her arrival here, Mitzi van der Merwe had done everything in her power to make Joy feel welcome. Beside her now she talked on. It couldn’t be impossible to be happy in South Africa. It was possible to be happy anywhere.
Joy made appropriate noises now and then. The Afrikaners were rather easy to insult. A buttoned lip and careful facial expressions and they’d still find judgement in your silence. But she had not judged. No.
As blue as the Quilter Cheviot website, the oncoming sky filled Joy’s vision. Neither as a child nor as an adult had Jonathan got any closer to the country of his mother’s birth than here. Not that the Villier money was Rhodesian – Zimbabwean – money, or his mother’s at all in fact. No, only for a couple of decades had the Villiers kept such holdings. Theirs was old money, in that it had no source.
She remembered Michael’s quick answers as she’d dropped him off last night, the hurried way he’d grabbed his bag. Really he was ceasing to be a child.
She said something about the temperature.
The Afrikaners were easy to insult partly because they were so generous. In no other corner of the world had Joy experienced quite the same level of generosity as she was once again about to encounter, spread across the kitchen tables and countertops at Mitzi’s brother in law’s farm. The drive to Stellenbosch would take a little under two hours.
