He woke to a giant crimson bull charging at him, its fiery eyes blurring his vision.
His car straddled the middle of the road for the head-on collision. Screeching, the car squealed like a puppy with a spine-chilling shrill as it swerved out of the way of the charging beast in the nick of time. Warped giant white Loki fonts marqueed in a flash on his side windows as the truck came close to scraping his car, knocking down his side-mirror instead. The mournful horn, its drawn echoes distinct along the hospital, sped past and slurred as it drawled eerily behind him.
During the commotion, he made out an irate face of a truck driver inaudibly cussing the day lights out of him.
The Mini dragged to a halt at a snail’s pace. His trembling hand fidgeted with the hazard lights button before moving on to the seat-belt. Gently panting, he retrieved the tennis ball from the glove compartment. In the rear view mirror, fading trails of steam marked where the wavy skid marks were, and shattered mirror sparkled in the rain.
Minutes later, a seat belt alarm chimed softly, almost too sympathetically as if to gently rouse him from a nightmare, against the clamouring horns of motorists lining behind him. The overwhelming warmth that had surged through him minutes ago dissipated, and by the time he reached home he was cold and clammy.
In a dimly lit carport, hours passed with him staring blankly at the windscreen.
Mme Malla had dozed off in front of the television with a blanket. He found her little sister riding the side of her bed, tucked to her thumb and stuffed elephant. For the first time he sobbed, rocking inconsolably, as if before him was her lifeless body.
***
Before sunrise at the Greylings, muted gargling could be heard coming from the bathroom. Next came the soft shuffling of feet that soon died wholly.
Andréa’s four year old sister, Ursula, was following a morning routine that involved tooth brushing, a national anthem, a glass of milk, and a good dose of morning cartoons in that particular order.
Laid on her stomach in bed, with pricked ears and baited breath whilst muttering supplications, Andréa’s crossed fingers slowly rose above her head.
“Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika…!” Ursula broke into it with as much effusion as her elfin chest could muster.
“Ag nee, can’t we get a break.” Groaned Andréa, burying her head under the pillow.
“Maluphakanyisw’ uphondo lwayo…” Poised and one hand placed on her pumped bosom, her waist-reaching hair bobbed to every word (except for the tongue-twisters).
“Really,” said Andréa’s father cuddled up to his wife in bed, “it’s Enoch’s tribute to HOA’s (Horn of Africa) former glory.”
Ursula’s voice echoed in the hallways, modulating in language and key as per the arrangement of the anthem.
“You know the composer?” Said his wife intrigued at her husband’s analysis of the Xhosa part of the anthem.”
“Here comes the Afrikaans part.”
They chorused dotingly as Ursula cleared her throat for her favourite part of the national anthem. The part where she mastered, or attempted thereof, a little patriotic bass in her voice. Indeed, a no mean feat for her size.
“Uit die blou van onse he-mel!”
“That’s it.” said Andréa gruffly, kicking the covers to the floor. Eyes peering wearily through frizzled hair and the pillow handy, she edged towards Ursula’s bedroom like a zombie.
On her flight downstairs, the Greylings matriarch greeted Andréa with a Restraining Order. She stopped dead in her tracks at the bottom of the stairs, and tugged her dressing gown to her chest; the name of Andréa’s twin brother slipped out when she called her out.
Andréa’s twin brother was a casualty of a farm attack when they were still toddlers, along with her grandfather and uncle. The grandmother, who miraculously survived, was left scarred for life. During the attack, Andréa was sound asleep on the floor between the curtains from the previous day game of hide-and-seek.
Her uncle, who converted to environmentalism when it was still considered a liturgy for hippies, saw the filthy-lucre in going green way before it became a PR gimmick; a sweet spot in the market, he would say – though not in so many words – to lure those who continue to have their way with mother earth. He died an entrepreneur of high-end rattan furniture.
Ten years after the tragic loss, Andréa’s father was jostled out of sleep by his wife, demanding their lost son back. That night they made love in tears like a couple in the wake of world war. Slumped next to him, she repeated her lost son’s name in between gasps, as if now that she did her part, her heart’s desire, wrapped in white linen, should descend at any moment. Nine months later, fate had something up its sleeve – Ursula, a bundle of mischief.
***
Senza had crashed in his garage studio. He was supposed to have had made it home a bit earlier to hit the sack then the studio. The walls of his studio were a bioluminiscent-like graffiti canvass of a realitically rendered Pandora. Half-face portrait of Neytiri in her tribal glory occupied the western wall. Her outline glowed on account of the fullmoon (whose surface was an eight-weeks pregnancy ultrasound) in the background. He used invisible paint that absorbed light during the day to glow when the lights went out. Hued in blue, Senza would focus on the western wall, as the entire room fade out like a drying river.
During the movie that inspired the painstakingly done mural, he shot to his feet inside a packed movie theatre. Both his jaw and fists clenched, rivulets of sweat coursed his body. The feral anguish in Zoe Saldana’s keening clawed at his soul. He looked as helpless as the day he heared a familiar sound for the first and last time until Avatar. A sound that haunted his sleepless nights long after the ordeal. Speech-impaired, her wailing was hauntingly alien and untamed.
Senza became an avid collector of DVD releases that featured Zoe Saldana in tears. Even a sob did it for him.
Mme Malla woke up to a faint aroma of Rooibos tea. What brought a smile to her face was not so much the gesture in itself, but the sight of Kruisement branch next to it.
Before moving to a modestly upscale, face-brick neighbourhood, from a cramped up, two-roomed house in what used to be the squatter camp, the mint used to be her pet luxury. Before the infiltration of lavenders and jasmine minted teas into the townships post-Apartheid, any woman offering tea to her guest without the herb risked standings of her social status.
“Hai, haele phoqo se sona.”
Shaking her head, she clapped once remarking at her son’s idiocy. The tea was cold.
***
As had been the case for some of South African universities since the dawn of the democratic era, University of Free State have had its fair share of drama whose screen-treatment, Professor Jansen’s tumultuous tenure alone, could spark bidding wars at Cannes.
In recent years it was riddled with unsavoury racial disturbances that generated a lot of international ink. However, this notoriety was somewhat attenuated when it conferred The Queen of Talk Shows with an honorary degree.
In Andréa’s words, the wooded campus was an epitaph (whatever that meant) to the self-contained greenhouse that once was nature. Those were some of the things that attracted Andréa the most to Kovsie against her mother’s wishes to study abroad, so to stretch her horizons, and spread her wings – strictly speaking, from the neck up, honey – she wryly added.
Inside the library, the thick grizzled fur of her hooded gilet from which her head resurfaced, made her look like a grey wolf on a prowl for a rare species between the shelves to sink her teeth into. Having piled her game on top of a tome, she thanked the library assistant and left for the cafeteria.
Inside the semi-deserted cafeteria, a waitress wearing all black, a khaki apron with Java clipart embroidery (and a forced but pleasant smile that thinly hid her exhaustion), held mid-air a tray carrying a steaming latte. Almost scampering, Andréa shifted her books around to make space.
As the tall latte cup in her hand slowly neared her lips, she caught a familiar whiff of cologne. It wafted and went like an imagined aroma of a craving, leaving no trace, while the latte went full throttle on her senses. Shrugging with her mouth, she gave in to the tempting first sip. At the corner of her eye, a vaguely superimposed silhouette sauntered across the view of the city, leaving behind a now stronger trail of the cologne.
We may have a stalker on our hands.
He passed behind her to join the short queue for a morning fix a few feet from her. He now looked a bit taller. Out of the blue the day before, he asked if the seat in front of her was taken after taking it. Phylum had dared him to hit on a white girl.
Four years back, they came across an article online that couldve easily come from the Buchanans coffee table. Racist as it was, Phylum teased each other about it, on who was probably the most unrehabilitable ‘snowhite junkie’ (a term they coined) amongst themselves. Nostrils flared, Senza was silent during the banter. Orion made advances to his Nigerian girlfriend for four years before she relented. Her family forbade her from dating a South African; their family home and business was burned down under xenophobic attacks. Bigotry comes in all shades and it’s one-size-fits-all, related Orion. Coming into office, Uncle Bob (no relations) promised his people milk and honey, only to later produce a fine print stating that ‘my people’ categorically referenced his ilk and Honey. As much as there was rhyme and reason in it, Senza was not hearing it.
The article was a parliament transcript made during Apartheid. The honourable speaker of the house said it went without saying that every black male had a roving eye for the white woman. Thus, measures should be made to keep ’em at bay.
The previous day, Phylum had clinched a deal north of seven figures. They were on cloud nine, more so Senza. Orion nudged him in the direction of the no-nonsense brunette with books cradled to her bosom, placing her helmet on the table. Senza’s sentiments hadn’t changed, but his moods allowed him to wing it just for kicks.
The little cheer in his eyes with which Senza greeted the cashier and ordered coffee, failed to hide the pain that reddened them. The coarsening lump in Andréa’s chest stirred at the sight of his clean-shaven scalp beneath his flatcap. She imagined it would take a trip to Mecca, a calling of some sort, to warrant an overnight locks-to-bald resolution. Many South African cultures shave one’s head to both part ways and mourn the passing of a loved one.
But…I mean…he’s a guy.
It seemed highly unlikely it had anything to do with their previous encounter. Before she knew it, he was about to pass by her table again.
“Sh**.”
She was drew blanks trying to remember his name. A disarming smile would do. She was greeted back by a face in search of the bottom of the next rugged cliff. Yesterday’s cafeteria scene was seared in his memory, yet he glimpsed past her on his way out. A prick of panic rose from the pit of her stomach.
At cheque-signature speed, she scribbled the word ‘flatline’ inside the margin of the notepad. With a swift swipe of the hand, she cleared everything on the table into a now bloated shoulder-strap bag, grabbed her helmet and took after him.
“What are you doing, Andréa? Where are you going, Andréa?”
At the western exit, the eyes of a female student fogged with confusion behind a wisp of steam emanating from the mug she was huddled to, as they followed Andréa’s flurry of inaudible ramblings.
Andréa ran after him, only to grimace and drop her helmet to the ground after a few steps. She held on to the shoulder strap that dug into her shoulder blade.
“Hey…wai…wait!”
Senza removed his right earpiece at the call of a panting voice now on his heels. When he turned around, she had leant onto her knees a few feet away, forefinger in the air, spurting out half sentences.
“Hi, we met yesterday,” she said removing her gilet that buried her face, “do you…do you have a moment…”
Seeing him reveal a gloomier depth, she trailed off incoherently. Exhaustion seemed to overwhelm his features upon realizing it was her. Her imploring eyes pleaded with him to say something. Anything. Heaving, he took off his hat, intensely kneaded his face, scratched his scalp and turned around.
“What the…” she said.
How he turned around to give her his back, and walked off without a word, she would have welcomed the crudest of expletives instead. She heard a commisserating ‘ouch’ from one or two students.
“Dump that white bi**h!” Said a male voice out of nowhere.
How Andréa wished the latter was the case. It would have meant the contact she now so wish to establish existed prior. She squared her still functioning shoulder.
“Hey, come back here!”
She marched to stand in front of him. He tried to walk around her a few times. A little scuffle ensued.
“Look,” she said defiantly, to her own surprise, “if you don’t give in, you’ll have to relocate to avoid me completely.”
The stalemate lasted for quite a while. The realization came to her that she had grabbed his wrist during her threats to stalk him. A gesture now maintained with a vicelike grip. Meaning he had given in to her manacles a while ago. Having trawled every ounce of what weighed heavily in her chest, the lump that begun in the cafeteria keelhauled her heart as it scorched its way to her throat.
“Can we…can we go somewhere quiet?” She rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Um, that…that did not come out right.”
The car keys he had begun fidgeting with dazedly, jingled in the space of a minute in which no word came from either of them.
She sighed. “Were you going somewhere?”
Reluctantly, he looked over to where his car was parked.
“Alrighty.”
***
Seated on a park-bench inside a tunnel of pine trees, the historical President Brand Street sloped gently on either side before them. Behind, a slightly elevated City Hall park afforded them protection from the Cape Doctor’s next of kin. The canopy of dappled saffron and russet towered above the park’s evergreen frontier from every side. Old government buildings of weathered sandstone, crennelated the city skyline. As if summoned by Midas himself, it was the season that Bloemfontein’s twilights, complemented by trans-seasonal shades, enchanted the sensitive.
An hour before, Senza dragged his feet to his car and mid-way Andréa asked him, no, commanded that he deactivate the car-lock system to let her in first. It was when Andréa recognised some of the landmarks more than thrice, a formidable equestrian statue for one, that she suggested a pit-stop. In silence, staring straight ahead, Senza was going in circles around the city.
Shoulders hunched to their ears, they now sat there in silence. She looked over to him and her heart sank. He had silently scooted away from her.
“I’m Andréa.” She said giving him her hand.
Without meeting her eyes, he replied with a forced smile and a half-hearted nod.
All that is gold does not glint, and so are sunset bathed autumn leaves, and so is silence when it’s not a treat.
Walls? A moat obscene fathoms deep around a fort. I’ll pole-vault then cross fingers for Stockholm.
When in short of words she resorted to wordplay on her spiral-notepad. None talking, each drifted to their thoughts like park-bench sharing strangers who preferred keeping to their own; a poetic coda that summed up their worlds.
Eyes distant, like a monk meditatively lingering over the last mala bead, Andréa’s thumb lazily explored each feature of her violet pansy pendant, sporting diamonds for anthers, attached to her silver charm.
Fresh from primary in high school, Andréa’s newfound friend alluded Africans’ lack of the word love in their vocabulary to their level of emotional intelligence. Andréa did not know what to make of it except to consult an adult. Her mother had never been the one to display censure, let alone ostensibly, towards any form of prejudice. For a platform, she preferred stacked books to a soapbox.
As usual, silent and expressionless, she searched her daughter’s eyes for a moment, mentally browsing a cache of “iconoclasts she has had the pleasure of devouring”. Andréa knew what would follow. She was about to become a recipient of a book covered with a film of dust for a gift-wrap. Her mother left the dusting off to recipients to “relish the mystique of re-discovering a relic.”
Andréa remained rooted to her spot as her mother disappeared in her study room. For good.
Strange.
The following day, through the print-on-demand services, Andréa was woken to a smell of a toner in the morning in the form of The Savage Mind by Claude Lévi-Strauss. After reading it, she scoured jewellery stores for weeks in search of a gem with her strict design specifications to no avail. Thanks to her piggy-bank, and a bald jewellery designer whose shaky hand had not lost its touch, the mystical intaglio became the most treasured thing next to her heart.
She chose the ‘wine-dyed’ gem for it was used as a counterpoise amulet in the past. Claude offered ‘Pansies for Thought’ as a title for the English translation of his work.
Thereafter the subject was never brought up again. Though, Andréa saw an opportunity. She developed a habit of feigning grave concern for various subjects not on her mother’s shelve. One day she found a note inside another hot-off-the-press gift.
To a toner addict mooching off of her mother’s savings.
Disgruntled Enabler.
All around Andréa and Senza, imitating a lyrical title sequence to a poignant yarn, shiftless penumbras faded in, cast a foliaged stencil along the deserted Pres. Brand, and drifted briefly before fading out. This shadow theatre was scored by a symphony of broken woodwinds, and pigeons’ feet pattering like the first droplets of rain, as the territorial tried in vain to maintain a pecking order.
Towards dusk, the intrusive hubbub, the pollution of Chaela, the mechanical nine-to-five throngs, their narcotic trails, restored the disquiet that brought them together. They showed signs of life when both, almost simultaneously, exhaled and took in the now colonized scenery. City slickers of feather snaked and snacked their way around the stampede as their jittery cousins watched in horror from sighing boughs above.
Along the western horizons, a panoramic burst of Midas’ palette was about to be frozen in time – an aurora occidens without a rhythm.
Senza turned to his right to find her spot vacant. Having discovered the efficacy of being non-verbal, she waited for him next to his car, inhaling pine cones and pine needles in turns. The toxicity of the atmospheric haze had engulfed a brisk, woody scent of the pine that had lulled them deeper into pensive oblivion. After much sniffing and vertigoing, she placed the cone inside one of her side-pockets and rubbed the needles in her hands, oblivious to the fascination of passers-by, more so of Senza’s arching brow.
On the road, the rhythmic but dull tapping of his fingers onto a steering wheel whenever the car idled held her rapt. He caught a glimpse of her cheeks cerise at his subconscious habit and stilled somewhat awkwardly. He could feel her piercing eyes exploring his side profile, picking him apart. Familiarizing herself with him on a personal level, she was drawn to the quiescence that now brooded over his nature.
Ruminitive and eyes fixed at no particular object ahead, her hand seemed to move on its accord over the spiral-notepad, resembling a psychic channeling messages from beyond.
He’s as mellow as a stripped down acoustic ballad.
Back at the park, once inside the car, he received instructions to her place. Nearing the bus-stop, a ten minutes walk to her home, she asked him to drop her off.
“Tomorrow. Same place. Same time.”
He struggled with a response for her eyes and tone intimated another stand-off.
“My people…will call…your people?” He said as she wittingly broke out in laughter mid his sentence.
Hugging herself against the cold, she bid him farewell with a wistful smile, and watched on the EAN5 – his street-art ‘nom de guerre’ – on his personalised plate until it became illegible.
“It may take a Medium to read your beautiful mind, but I’m game.”
She muttered to herself after a long controlled sigh. Stiffening her quivering lip, she lugged her baggage, and started homeward misty-eyed.
__END__
