Dungeons and Cabinets

‘I found it!’ said a woman stepping into the office. She had a dusty file of frayed and yellowing documents. She was elated. The three occupants of the office looked impressed and perhaps a little envious of her little triumph. The way they congratulated her it seemed to as if it had been days since any of them had a comparable success.

This was not promising. I had come to the central Home Affairs office to follow up on my passport renewal application. Over a year ago I had made the application from Cape Town but nothing had come of it except for a shiny receipt. So now I have come into the belly of the beast in Lusaka to investigate the hang-up.

‘I can’t find your forms’ said the slim dark woman behind the desk with a little smile she said on my second visit. ‘You will just have to submit again. It should take seven days’. I could not think of a more cruel fate. How I hate completing forms. I loathe also the stupid system of certifying photocopies of documents issued by the very same Home Affairs office. I would gladly take a hose pipe to my buttocks and dig a pit in wet earth as I did as school punishment. Stripes on my backside for noise making. I would rather talk in class all day.

‘Are you sure you can’t find them?’ I said with a forced smile. She had just paged through three exercise books of handwritten entries at great speed searching for my name. The entries seemed to follow neither alphabet nor date. A couple of times I thought I had seen my name flash as I watched but I didn’t want to interrupt.

‘You want to look?’ she said to me offering me one of the books. ‘Yes’ I said. But she hesitated for a moment and then said ‘well you can’t. It is not allowed’.

On my first visit to Home Affairs I went early and found two long queues outside a pair of large doors. One queue was for men and another for women; as if they were before a large lavatory. When the great doors swung open we hurried into a building in near darkness. Up the wide dusty staircase we went and filed into a large auditorium behind a row of six cubicles. In each cubical an official stood behind a screen of glass. There we queued side by side in the dim light in six lines. I naively thought I could simply line-up and show my receipt from Pretoria and pick up my passport.

‘You have to go to room 9. They deal with commissions’ the man in the cubical told me after I explained my Cape Town story. But on the way I took a wrong turn and went up a grand staircase with a balustrade showered, strangely, in bright morning sunlight. At the top I found a landing blocked with broken furniture. I retraced my steps and returned to the auditorium. There I slipped behind the cubicles, and found a narrow staircase covered in old torn carpets that led me to a row of offices behind a balcony.

From there I could survey the entire auditorium.  The cubicles below me looked like a line of defence under attack from two sides. On one side was the mass of people standing in lines with a quiet determination. On the other a mass of steel cabinets overloaded with files of paper in various stages of disrepair. The cabinets were dusty and in no discernable order . The worst of them had files falling out like the guts spill out of a mortally wounded animal. The further the cabinet was from the line of cubicles, the worse its condition. In a gloomy corner piles of passports were almost completely camouflaged in dust.

A chill went through me then. I felt as if I had stumbled across a storeroom of skeletons dressed in old clothes. A waste of people’s lives. Each rotting file a mass of carefully filled in forms. Piles and piles of certified copies turning yellow in the dark.

‘You’re lucky I found it’ she said as she slammed a fat file of forms on her desk on my third visit. The forms were subdivided into smaller files. Each subdivision had stapled on the corner a passport size photo of a member of my family. I saw my mother’s black face with a look of apprehension. ‘Without this file we were not going to know your citizenship and you would not get your passport.’

I was sat by her desk with a small collection of forms and certified copies to ‘resubmit’. In the office numerous staff and wishful applicants walk in and out. The staff step right into the centre and share an anecdote or a joke. At other times they are on their mobile phones. The applicants instead knock meekly and at sit cautiously on a chair by the door while the rest wait quietly outside the door.

‘What a big family I have. I mean look how thick the file is’ I said. Maybe charm would get me my new passport I thought. I am inept with bribes in any case. Besides, I had begun to think of her as quite attractive somehow. It must have started when I saw her free of her desk that one time; walking with a quiet resolve in her neat clothes up to room 9. She is probably my age after all. Apart from her slim waist she didn’t chitchat in the office as the others did. Neither did she take calls on her mobile phone. A more sensible person would hate her. So much about my life depends on that document. My study and work abroad. Not even my bank in Cape Town recognises me without that passport. But l was attracted instead.

‘So you think your family is big eh?’ she said. ‘Yes. I mean my mother went to the hospital four times’ I replied. The office was listening now. She was quiet at first and then came her reply. ‘They’re thirteen of us in my family. My mother went to the hospital fourteen times’ she said. ‘Oh’ I said. ‘That is a bit bigger. I think your dad should have had a little help from maybe a mother number two’. Her reply was quick. ‘He did! She went six times. And then another one went three times. And then there were two extra as well.’

She delivered a snippet of her personal history with a tone of pride. In one go she had shown me that she is authentic and funny. I had to concede that my family is not large at all. From then on she spoke to me in a kind and sympathetic like I was her favourite pupil. She asked me to see her at the end of the week. But that is less than the seven days she initially promised. So maybe she took a liking to me after all.

On my final visit that I found out why the inside of Home Affairs building was so dark. From the distance, I could see that all the windows on the front of the building had been blocked with old and discarded files. When I was inside I sat meekly in the chair for wishful applicants and waited for my lady to return. While I was there, a woman with both a Zambian and foreign accent was giving a man in the office a harangue. ‘Mr Ngulube I have been coming here for 6 months and always you tell me to come next week. Where is my letter!?’ He was meek before her behind his cluttered desk but she went on and on. Finally he admitted to losing it. He then asked her to ‘submit again’ and she stormed out. When my lady returned she said to the man ‘I see you have been fighting with your woman again?’

Then she surprised me with my new passport. It was green and clean like a new prayer book. Though I might never enter the US with it (my father said I look like an Arab in it) I was exceedlign grateful. ‘What is your name?’ I asked. She smiled at me and said ‘Norah’.

I Can’t Dance

I don’t do singing. I can’t sing. This I know for a fact. And yet there are times when I am so moved by a song that I begin to hum along and maybe, just maybe say the words to the chorus when I am taken by a song I like. Every time this has happened, and it does not happen to me very often, someone close to me happens to be nearby to say in a calm flat tone “Jumani, please don’t sing”.

One such person is my little sister, Kupela. Somehow, at my most embarrassing moments she is there waiting to point out to me how foolish I look. The first time I kissed a girl in the cinema is a case in point. She was sat in the row behind me when my silhouette hunched over the nervous girl next to me and obscured the view of something like Edwin Cameron’s The Titanic when she said “Jumani please don’t do that in public”. Kupela, on the other hand is nonchalant when it comes to daring and bold. She sings in the shower to her hearts desire on a Sunday morning. She sings under that tap loud enough to get dad out of the bath to put up the volume on the BBC radio and not suffer any recriminations at the family breakfast table soon after.

However, it doesn’t bother me so much though that I don’t often express any sounds when under the sensation of rhythm or passion. But it can bother other people. This is why when I have sex I have a standard collection of things I say, progressively louder and in sync as the heaving and pushing quicken, to convince my partner that I am enjoying the sex of my life. Nothing sincere of course. No roar that rips out of my chest at the sheer explosive joy of it nor a whimper at the end to signal that I am ready to submit to whatever bureaucratic punishment life has to offer after such a joy. No such sounds out of my throat, however much I enjoy the excursion. In its place is only a consistent grunt to keep things going.

I am not much different when it comes to dancing either. But at least there I can hide behind my English genes. I can say that my father is an Englishman and so my bum is considerably rigid. This contrasts quite strongly with my  sisters (I have four in all) who seem to take after our African ancestors when it comes to gyrating their bums to rhythm of lurid Congolese songs or something of equivalent sentiment from the US of A. Countless times I have been to parties with and had some of my best friends point at me, so that everyone can see, and make fun of my hapless attempts wiggle my bum and then laugh. And so when Tobre, the woman who under writes my dilettante existence, gets gripped by a song and is fashioned into a lurid and pornographic dance she is often disappointed to see me take refuge from her at the bar and try to compensate  by nodding my head to the music with a sheepish smile. (When I do let go of the bar table and allow my self to drown in a crowd of writhing bodies I know I have drank too much and should go home).

What I can do though is walk. I do walking with such confidence and flare that between my home and office I have done a march, a cantor, a skip and a waltz every morning. I leap onto and off curbs. I boldly step in front of on coming traffic with graceful large strides. I do pirouettes on the landings between successive flights of steps and I explode through door ways as if in a Michael Jackson music video. This is a wonderful skill my Englishman father taught me, this walking. With him in his Northampton leather shoes he put me through gruesome training when we raced up and down escalators and public steps in his home town while shopping for nearly-new clothes to take back to our socialist country. Later I returned to England and worked in London for 18 months. During this time I used public transport everyday which made for a thorough internship in aggressive endurance walking when I raced between trains and buses. I now wear a pair of feet that cut pavements they way otters slice through the tepid waters of a river bank.

Of course it helps the walking to have music in my ears with my new iPod when I am on a march between the station and home. I am a late comer to this audio-internet universe and since I have entered it I found to a wonderful way to get just the right walking music while I tear through my sleepy suburb in my leather Lacoste shoes. When I do this, I slip on my favorite walking music(usually Phoenix’s Listomania) and leap from step to step with rhythm and to a beat. There isn’t a sister or childhood friend to point at snicker on my way home, and even if there was, I am so busy snapping my fingers and turning on my heals that I wouldn’t notice them. With my best feet forward, step by step, it occurs to me that I am dancing. I am dancing past trimmed hedges, galvanized steel gates and barking dogs. Perhaps I am free like this because I think only the domestic animals can see me. The man reading the paper in his car in the shade can’t see me. The woman in the burkha can’t see me. The grandmothers behind the lace curtains are not looking at me. The mosque’s minaret calling the pious to prayer doesn’t notice me. But they know I am dancing. I am dancing all the way home.

Blued Eyed Boy

Where does a life begin and how will I know when it will end? This life in particular could have had its start with a stripped jacket. It is something to smarten me up a bit while I do some teaching. But it is also something for me to wear through the cold and wet months. A warm thing that is a little tight around the arms and has a lot of pockets. On a weekday morning, one of these pockets produce a list of points scribbled onto  a folded paper to remind me what to cover in the lecture. Each time I copy this list of reminders onto the board at the front of the class and number them. The points then make up the structure of the lecture. The predetermined notes on the board and the stripped black jacket at the front give the air of authority and timeless truth. The charade must work some of the time, why else will some students insist on calling me sir.

There was a time when this jacket made life fresh and new. It made my feet quick again and held me together. With the jacket on me, my shoulders were bigger and my waist slimmer. It made me laugh out loud and smile when I spoke . Even a one man army needs a uniform. A mask to conceal the true man and make him.  But jackets fade. In the middle of the week my feet are not so quick. I begin to watch the clock in staff meetings. Back in my office the riot of paper on my desk has grown to a sumptuous heap. The laptop computer has lost touch with the wireless network again and I dread another trip to the IT help desk where the young woman there loathes my fumbling visits where I say “I can’t get this thing to work …”.

Laurence found me standing outside the department trying to persuade my phone to give life a second chance. He just casually walked up to me with a grin on his face and said ‘What’s up man’ like it hadn’t been months since we last met. Like he hadn’t been in New York at parties on rooftops overlooking central park while I provided emotional support to students who can’t factorize algebraic expressions. He looked at me straight in the eye with a grin on his face like it was Friday night. Floating in those blue eyes I saw a resilient determination.

At a Jewish cafe well out of the orbit of the mob of undergraduate students Laurence and I catch up over coffee, chips and a view of the mountain. We sit outside in the cold on a bench. Laurence wants to know what has been happening. He wants to know what the political scandals have been and where the ground zero of craven political bungling is. “What are the books to read?”, “what is the theatre to see?” and “how are all the friends doing?”  The truth is he knows it all and has read it all up by the internet from New York and his University’s library over there has everything we do here. He wants to hear it from me though. He wants me to make it real for him. I take a sip of my coffee to play for time and rattle off a couple of book titles and mention a good book shop. I mention the suggested National Health Insurance scheme and parrot a couple of anecdotes I heard on the radio. But then he betters me and tells me of the shocking antics of the american far right and their TV stations.

Laurence drives me home in his mothers car and rescues me both from the chaos of my office and the mess on the trains. In the house we catch Tobre watching Oprah on the television. Over half a dozen cups of tea and the chicken Tobre pulled out of the oven, Laurence and I get talking about our harrowing moments gone by. We laughed about how I drove his punctilious Swedish housemate in Geneva into are rage by leaving a hair in her shower (“You have no respect for me!” she yelled). We told of how we went to dinner with rich girls from a bank and couldn’t cover our end of the bill. I told Tobre about how Laurence would pick up girls at bars in West London at night and then be surprised to find that they were psychotic nuts who either fall in love with him or tell him to “stay away from me!”. He told Tobre of how I asked a girl if she was HIV + (“you should get your status checked … “) because she was so thin and I had to apologize afterwards. I told Tobre how Laurence had to have a doctor to beg him to take a day off work for the sake of his health. Laurence told me I could find a good job in Johannesburg.

Laurence drove off to meet an old friend from school at a bar. Laurence is here for three weeks to visit friends and family and teach on a course at the university. Everyone one wants a piece of him before he goes back to continue his adventures abroad. I put Tobre’s car in the garage. In the house Tobre had all the dishes in the sink and was snug in bed and half asleep already. I put my stripped jacket on the chair in the bedroom and thought Maybe I could do with another Jacket.

I’m Not Here

It had been a week since my phone disappeared through the back window. Just as well I bought one on the bottom end of the market. That is the right attitude with gadgets in this world abound with them – no commitment. Keep them cheap and small. If you lose one, get another, and another, and another. As long as they keep stealing the cheap nasty things, I will keep buying them, until the underworld of stolen goods is saturated with them. Gadgets are not important. ID documents, now those are important.

So you can understand my concern when I looked into the secret hiding spot for my passport only to find it was not there. Being robbed gives me a lingering sense of paranoia. A missing passport on the other hand sends me into an instant state of panic. Once I am sure it is not where it is supposed to be, and not where it usually is, the alarm bells start to ring.

At this point my body becomes overcome with sudden quick movements. Standing in the middle of the bedroom, I begin to twirl around and around as a I look onto every conceivable surface. It is not under the bed. It is not under that pile of magazines. It is not in the pockets of my clothes that are too precious to go into the washing machine. Nothing. By this point, I am tearing the bedroom apart. I have the bed sheets off, the drawers ripped out of the cupboard and everything up-turned. Where could the “bloody thing” be?

Before I can begin to destroy the kitchen in a similar spirit, my girlfriend walks into the house from the car.

“Baby, I have been waiting. What are you doing?”

“I am tearing the house apart, can’t you tell? I can’t find my fucking passport.”

To this, Tobre suffers a brief flash of horror herself. But unlike me she goes for the rational approach and asks “When did you have it last?”

“When I was at the bank last Saturday. But I know I brought it back”

“And then where did you put it?” is the next logical inquiry.

“Here by the bed I think. Right there where the phone was before it was stolen”

“What?!” she responds. I too go into shock. This is more serious. I was robbed of more than just a phone it seems. My passport is missing too. Oh my Mary mother of Jesus. There are few things that could be worse to contemplate.

Tobre then goes for the next rational thing to do – denial. She says, cool as you like, “You must have left it at the bank”.

“Baby, I know I didn’t leave it at the bank”

“Then where is it?” she asks, pretending to herself that it is not a rhetorical question.

“Well it is gone isn’t it. Gone ’till its gone. Gone ’til November. Stolen! Bastard.”

“I am sure you will find it” she says in a flat tone.

But my panic continues. I continue to destroy the house, room by room. I pulled at my hair and I chewed on my lower lip. My memory gave up no secrets that morning. Maybe it is at the office I thought. But nope, I definitely had it after I went to the bank. I began to suffer from Tobre’s denial. And so off to the bank I went, throwing off all the Saturday morning’s programs, which included supervising the construction of a front fence to the house that would allow us to hold our heads up high on the streets of Plumstead. A project that had been weeks in the making.

The bank said they had nothing. I had stood in a queue for an hour in that understaffed branch as if I too wanted to be served and got nothing in return but further disappointment. On the way back from the hardware store, where we bought titanium steel bits for a drill, Tobre said to me in the most lukewarm of tones, “I am sure you will find it”.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I launched with the salvo “This is serious. This bloody serious!”

“You don’t understand” I said. “Without my passport I am nowhere in this country. The bank won’t recognise me, my own university won’t recognise me. I can’t do important bank transactions and I cannot renew my study permit. I am screwed without it. Without it I am not really here.”

“And worse still, I can’t go to Joberg without it. You get arrested within a day there if your without your passport and foreign over there. I will have to bribe them daily. How am I going to do my research over there?”

In reply I she said “I am sorry baby” which was wholly unsatisfactory. But at least she saw the gravity of the situation I thought. Emboldened by this, I continued;

“You’d think it were ok since I already applied for a new passport, so all I have to do is wait for the new one. But that is already  4 months overdue. The Zambian High Commission, after that fantastic delay without explanation finally admitted that they also need a copy of my Zambian registration card. But that card was lost when I was robbed in Zimbabwe in December.”

“So what are you going to do then” she asked and caught me off guard. I thought I was talking to myself.

“Well, I have electronic copies of the registration card so I could use those. But then they do want certified copies instead. I can’t get them certified because the original card was stolen. So I will have to go back to Zambia to get a replacement. But then I can’t do that because I can’t travel without my old passport which is now stolen . . . so basically, I am screwed.”

Later that afternoon, when, by some sort of emotional inertia that allows you to daydream even when your stricken with grief or pain, I began to look past the missing passport. So what if I have no ID document. How can I possibly think a laminated few pages to mean so much to me. Look at me I thought. Everything will be fine. Never mind the endless queues, bribes, delays, photocopies and just plain bureaucratic madness I will have to go to get it all replaced. I could do that later, when I am ready. With this absurd sense of serenity, I went back to the fence project and stopped over at another hardware store to buy about 200 bolts for the fence.

While there, Tobre drove up in her uncle’s car to tell me that the men had arrived to do the fence. Then she helped me carry the bolts into the car (Stormy). When we get there, a bolt drops under the car seat and she stoops over to retrieve it. While down there, she breaks into a vulgar laughter. When she stands up, she has my passport in her hand. It was under the drivers seat the whole time.

“I told you we would find it” she said in triumph.

A Load of Shit

Paranoia always follows a robbery. It does not matter how well you take the initial shock or how calm you are about being outwitted one of societies crafty agents, you remain a little jumpy and doubly cautious about your property and person. Who is that man on the street corner? and what is that shadow in the backyard?

One Sunday morning, Tobre and I came home to find a message from the private police to say the alarm had gone off. Inside the house, the back-window was open but all that was missing was my phone. I thought, in my vast experience of theft, that we had gotten off lightly. The computer, digital camera and my wallet remained untouched. One of my much better robberies.

And yet my equanimity gave way to suspicion and exagerated caution. In the first instance, although little was taken that Sunday morning, the robbery was a little unusual. While the introduer had taken only a phone, he (all burglers are ‘he’s somehow) had left something behind. On the grass at the back was a small deposit of human feaces. The visitor had reason for spite it seemed. It must have been Gift, I thought. He has his reasons for spite. “God will judge you” he said. Perhaps the prophecy had come true (again). If not Gift, perhaps one of the casual labourers that hang about across from the corner shop waiting for jobs, of which Gift was a member. They would know, from the bordom of their daily vigil, when we are out and when we are out for a long while.

This explains why my instinct for sleuth was piqued on the following Saturday morning. Just as we drove out the yard, past the phalnx of casual labourers, one of them stood up and began to make his way down the street that goes past our backyard. The very one, I am sure, who was built slim with a fat nose and a wide hat, that grinned at me crudely that morning after the robbery as I drove past. “Thank you” he seemed to be saying with that smile. I was convinced he was on his way to make another attempt on the houses defences.

To catch him in the act, I drove around the block, drove up to the house from a different direction, pulled into the driveway, disarmed the alarm and opened the front door in the same movement, and then stormed into the house. I rushed to the back window to see who was there. I expected to catch him, with his hand through the window, groping around for more goodies. Or I expected to see him stood in the middle of the yard, caught in the act. I wanted him to see me seeing him. I did not want to apprehend him. I wanted to look him in the eye as I caught him in the act. I wanted to tell him with a subtle nod that I too am always watching. I will be watching him much closer than he will be watching me.

I drew the curtains open in one abrupt and triumphant swing. In the backyard there was no one there. Everything was quiet, except from the constant noise of cars on the motorway yonder. Nothing was broken or missing.

Township Boozing

Monday is far away at Mzoli's

Bright sun rays on my face and I have a headache. Scattered about the room were my clothes from last night. A white linen jacket over the chair. A belt on the floor. A pair of trousers with its legs in a knot in a laundry basket, hiding a wallet and a set of house keys. A pink tie molesting a yellow bra. Only then did I remember that I was at a wedding. The woman asleep next to me drove us home. And just as well too, the throbbing in my head is proof enough that I had no business behind the wheel.

Outside the sun was high and the panorama of the mountain face was clear in a blue sky beyond the leafy trees. Along the road that divides these trees from the palm trees, and the churches from the mosques, lies a corner shop. Across another road from the shop is a phalanx of casual labourers seated on rocks by the curb. Their languid vigil is broken only by nightfall and the odd bakkie (pick-up van) pulling along side to offer piece work. I avoid eye contact lest I hire a gardener out of pity. In the shop the eggs are small, the bread thin and the Sunday papers bulky with advertising. Eggs on toast, headlines, a strident editorial and a careful reading of the book review section. Apart from the din of speeding cars on the highway outside, it is quiet. But surely there is more to life than the next day, Monday. And indeed there is. There is Mzoli’s.

I had promised one of the guests at the wedding from outside town that there was more to Cape Town than he could see from the highway. I told him that apart from leafy expensive suburbs, ubiquitous road works, large shopping malls, even larger parking lots and the strange creole population with their incomprehensible patua, there are noisy, flashy and colorful drinking halls where black people can make noise during the day and beer is sold on a Sunday. Bella, the wedding guest, had flown over from Zambia the week before and could not understand a word from the creole shop tellers and their patua while on his rabid shopping sprees. While still recovering from the relatively cheap local price of single malt whiskey, he expressed his concern, between wedding speeches, of the absence of rich, ambitious and cantankerous black men such as himself, by his casual observation. In short, he wanted to know where the black Africa of the new democratic South Africa had gone. “Don’t worry Bella” I said. “I will take you to Mzoli’s. After all, this is my town” (And it indeed it is).

And so, enter Gugulethu, the black township just off the highway to the airport and the other side of the railway line from the creole population with their strange patua. In Gugs there are neither trees nor palm trees. Neither shopping malls nor mosques. Neither a McDonalds nor a Madrassa. Instead there is a boundless fleet of Toyota Cressidas (1 in 3 cars is a Toyota Cressida) in varying stages of disrepair constantly roaming the streets that are teaming with pedestrians, lined with terraced houses and blessed with the free spirit of a dogs scrounging for food. And yet in the middle of it all this, crammed into once spot, on weekends there is a hive of activity and overcrowding. There is a quagmire of parked cars (and not just Toyota Cressidas), a concentration of shabeens (where liquor is sold from a house without a license), all four automated teller machines (rarely are the ATMs of the four major our banks found on one city block), loud music, an infantry of street hawkers and a forest of mobile toilets. All of this is built around a single butchery, Mzoli’s.

Chrip, Chirp squeaks the central locking on Stormy (my girlfriends car) and I throw myself into the throng of the Mzoli crowd. There on to the busy pavement is Bella with a whole unit of people that include his wife and my sister. “Ah, I see you made it” I say. And then I add, while gesticulating to the crowd around us “Welcome to Mzoli’s”. Bella and the unit of people look bewildered. They don’t know where to start. They are also pretty anxious about being robbed. So I take the lead. “Follow me!” I command. I take the unit to a cordoned off eating area where there are benches in the shade, a DJ with speakers the size of small boats and a dance area across an asphalt street. Every where there are people in action; people eating, people dancing, people looking good and other people simply looking.

Shouting now over the music, I bark out what has to be done. “First, we have to secure a bench to sit at. Second, we have to buy beer from the shebeens in the houses that surround us. Third, we have to buy the meat from Mzoli’s butchery and take it to the braai (barbecue) masters at the back to be braaied.” This is standard Mzoli procedure and the idea of Mzoli’s business, when it started was a simple one; after you buy your meat from the butchery, why bother take it all the way home to braai and eat when you could braai it and eat it right there at the butchery, finish and klaar. And so, Mzoli butchery will, in addition to selling you meat, marinade it and braai it for you with a small fee for the marinade only. You can then at leisure sit down outside on plastic furniture and eat your delicious and tender braai meat to the music coming out of the boot of your own car or, as more usual with me, listen to the music coming out of other peoples cars. This is where being the rich, ambitious and cantankerous black man comes into play, with expensive cars and equally expensive sound systems in the boot.

And so there I was in this epic queue in a butchery that is not designed to hold that many people and without air conditioning. Bella and the rest of the unit had squeezed onto one half of a bench in the crowd and were holding their position and armed with only beer and ice against the throng of a boozing, eating and dancing crowd while they waited for me to bring the beef. Standing in the slow moving queue, I was ahead of a group of rather beautiful people of the creole population who were kind enough to keep my place while I took a phone call. Among them were a couple of guys under carefully chosen summer clothes and sun glasses with a beautiful specimen of a woman among them. After I bought the meat, I jumped the queue for the braai masters with the help of a little bribe for an industrious braai master. I returned to Bella and my unit with a bounty of hot, spiced, tender braaied meat which we washed down with cold beers.

“How did you get your meat braaied so fast” asked one of the creole men who was in the queue behind me. He was surprised to find me polishing off a pork chop while him and his crew of the immaculately dressed waited for their food to have their turn in the boundless queue for the fire.

“Why, I bribed the braai master of course. This is South Africa after all. Somethings take a little encouragement” I replied, with a smug smile.

“I wish we had done that” said the beautiful specimen of a woman from behind tinted sunglasses. “We have been waiting for ages”.

“Well it is all part of the experience” I said, from behind my own pair of tinted sunglasses. “I remember the good old days at Mzoli’s” I went on. Sensing a good conversation coming on, the two of them, woman and boy, took a step closer to listen to what I had to say in the pulsating noise under the afternoon sun.

The boy introduced himself as Greg, and the girl as Mags. Then I carried on…”Things are not as they used to be. Mzoli’s has become quite popular. It is no longer that quirkly place from where you could escape the calculating madness of the city and its all its fees. Now tour buses are a regular feature at Mzoli’s, dumping whole populations of camera happy project managers from far away countries where garbage is recycled into five different categories. Mzoli’s is now the feature hang-out spot of countless magazine center pages and is also (this one really gets to me) the place to which young and naive first year students of my University are transported to give them the feel of the real Cape Town”

Mags chipped in and said “And now you can’t find a table anymore”.

“Neither can you find a cold beer in any of the shebeens” said Greg and we all nodded in commiseration.

In response I said, “Well I’ve got some cold beers. I brought ice and a cooler bag. Want one?”

“Yes sure, thanks” said Greg.

And so a quick friendship was formed as we then went on describe our mundane lives. Mags, the shapely woman with fantastic legs extending out of her white shorts, told me about training to be a dentist at the University where a lot of the creole population attend. Greg said he sells wedding dresses in a small shop on one of the main streets of the southern parts of the city.

Greg and Mags, it seemed to me, were part of a much larger crowd of men dressed as boys. A group of people dressing down on the weekend to get relief from what I presume is the suffocating formal dress code of their week day jobs. Strangely, there wasn’t another girl among them and yet Mags seemed to be with none of them. Though she was by Greg side all the while. They seemed to me, the way they freely associated with each other, Mags and Greg, to be a sort of asexual best-friends pair. If anything, I think Greg was attracted to me. He kept stepping closer to me as we chatted and drank beer. In any case, we had to be close to hear each other speak, since it was so noisy. I, on the other hand, kept drifting towards Mags, hoping to somehow accidentally touch her pale and (I imagine) smooth skin or make her laugh to see her extraordinarily white teeth again.

Bella, my sister and the rest were occupied with drinks, meat and holding the table and were in any case out of earshot. The three of us, Mags, Greg and I were every now and then interrupted by a boy or two from the rest of their clan, who crashed in and said this or that in their creole patua and this and that about booze, Brazil and where else to go that afternoon. They were quite drunk. One of them, who seemed to me even more attracted to me than Greg was, put his arm around me and spoke into my face like an aroused abusive lover. He then squeezed one of my nipples before Greg stepped in to my rescue and asked me to excuse his friend whose name was not “John” after all.

Our little love triangle continued despite all this. Better still, Greg was off some place for a short while, leaving Mags all to myself. She was quite charming in that interim period and seemed to lavish me with quite enough attention in Gregs absence. To be honest, I am not entirely sure what we spoke about. I suppose we both made fun of the Jack Daniels promotion that was on at Mzoli’s and the cause of much of the noise. As part of the promotion, there was a huge black truck and trailer, dwarfing the matchbox size Gugulethu houses, parked outside the butchery and was the central focus of the afternoons entertainment.

“What is with the bodygaurds?” she asked rhetorically. “They are so Saturday night. And this is Sunday afternoon!”

“Yeah” I said “And do we need  this coterie of tall slim girls with neither a pair of buttocks nor a taste for braaied food trying to sell a drink they don’t like. Give me back the good old days at Mzoli’s any time”.

Then mags asked “So where is your girl friend this afternoon?”

“She is at home watching the cricket” I replied, trying to look unfazed by the bold confrontation. After a pause, we continued chatting away as before.

Greg soon returned with a little meat finally, but neither Greg nor Mags ate any, strangely. I too, though I am usually quite greedy, only took a skittish nibble at the tender meat. Sometimes the whole meat procedure at Mzoli’s  is just so you don’t seem out of place. Greg and Mags eventually moved on, with their roaming team of acolytes, deeper into the crowd and our little love triangle was broken. Greg said I should drop by the shop sometime and we could get up to something some weekend or other.

Back into stormy, with the left over beers in the boot and the sun low over the horizon, I took the back streets home. I drove through the ghetto’s and the graffiti gang territories in a happy daze that took me most of the way back to my leafy streets before I realized I was driving with my boot open.

I think it is time to find another Mzoli’s. I need to strike a little deeper into the black township, where people’s ambition and life insurance policies still fear to tread.  To find another food outlet with adjacent constellation of shebeens. But maybe before that I will drop in on Greg sometime.

A Free Lunch

A Friday afternoon in late summer and the lethargy is returning. It is seeping back under the doors and down the passages of the department. Like a shadow across the university. I can see it now, engulfing my desk over the tutorials and the lecture notes and across onto the keyboard. In its wake, all is less urgent. There are papers to be read, scripts to mark, academic papers to read and documents to edit but that is ok because the lethargy is coming. The corridors outside my office are empty. The cleaning staff and the students are gone. They have already escaped. The lethargy must not catch us. Or not catch us between these walls if at all.

And so I will run. I will run into the weekend and hit it so hard and go so deep, Monday will never find me. I will run for the bus at half past the hour at the top of the steps. All the way up the steps I will run. Click the laptop is closed and in the bag. Zip and my folder is stuffed with scripts to mark. Bang and the door to the office is shut and and off I go. I will brush against sweaty beautiful students  in the overcrowded bus while it careens down the mountain slope and out of the clouds shadow. I will dash through beams of light and shade that stream between the city streets as I rush past the queue of people evacuating from the metropolis. Screech the train pulls up. I ease down the crowded aisle, where there is a woman with hair dyed orange, fair skin and a book in her face. Over a page she winks at me.

“Fancy meeting you here” she says to me as I squeeze into a seat next to her.

“Yes I know, it must be fate” I say.

“That or you were listening when I said I will be on the fourth carriage from the back”.

“Yes, I do listen sometimes”.

“So what are we doing this weekend?”

“Hmm, lets see. First we must walk through the heat to get home to that overheated house. Then we open all the windows and the doors crack open two beers. Then you go the hen party  with the pole dancer while I hang around some place to pick you up after. Tomorrow is the potjiekos day, so we must pick up the potjies and then buy the meat and drinks. After four hours of cooking the potjies, our friends and your family arrive and we get quite drunk in our own front yard. Then on Sunday we take back the potjies under the fog of a hangover and wonder where the weekend went”.

“Ah yes. Just another relaxing weekend”.

But the weekend has not happened yet. There is still room for surprise and the mood when we get home is  pregnant with promise. There is still something to dress up for. She is going for a hen party with pole dancing while I have to pick up a hen from the airport and then spend the night by my lonesome. And so comes the best part of the evening. Dressing up. Carefully, I choose my underwear, slacks, shirt, jacket, socks and shoes. With the Friday beats blasting on the laptop like a soundtrack, I shower and dress. Buttons, zips, clasps, clips and a tap-tap as I walk my boots on the wood floor. Privately, I think Batman enjoys putting on the suit more than he does catching bad guys or contemplating the morality of being a force of good behind a mask.

Curiously, the woman I share a bed with has dressed up into a set of pajamas. The theme for the pole dancing hen party is bedtime and so bed ready she is, with her bride gift of lingerie wrapped and pretty. Dressed for the the night we open the cave to launch our own batmobile, with its set of rocket boosters and central-locking. It is affectionately named Stormy. And so in a burst of acceleration, we tear through a series of street intersections and pull up to an automated teller machine.

But in today’s unequal world, a woman can not step out of her car in her pajamas and use an ATM. So I, ever the gallant gentlemen, better dressed for the nightlife must withdraw her fee for the pole dancer for hire on her behalf (“I need R100 for the dancer and R100 for myself”). Out the car I come to a NEDBANK machine which is not my extortionist of choice and so the procedures are unfamiliar. That explainsy me choosing the wrong account type and keying in the wrong password. The rejection slip comes and I promptly stuff it into the trash can placed next to it which is especially placed for discarded slips. Second time around I have got the R200 and balance slip to discard into the trash can again. But wait. There is something in there that is made of paper and blue that is not a slip. It is a R100 note! Somebody put a R100 note into the trash can…and walked away with the slip instead. What an idiot. God bless that foolish man or woman. In my fingers go, into the little slit of an opening and reach for the R100 note and I have a little bonus for the weekend. What a Friday. What a wonderful feeling it is to be free. To be free to spend somebody else’s money.

Singing along with the radio, I gave my girlfriend her money and pocketed MY R100. I tipped her off at the hen party and sped on to the airport. As I changed lanes I was really feeling the Madonna on the radio (I just woke up from a fuzy dream/You would believe the things I’ve seen). In the arrivals lounge, a lady in a bar was kind enough to serve me draft beer and my rugby team was obliging enough to give me the first win of the season. Then out popped my hen from the baggage area who I promptly delivered to the pole dancing coop. Stormy and I then blasted through a dozen intersections and traffic lights to Lower Main rd Obs where I had double whiskeys with a crowd of people with kinky hair, casual clothes and little ambition in life. They made a good show of ignoring me and I returned the favour.

And then finally (with Stormy on autopilot by this stage) I made my way to a bar, near the pole dancing coop, called Oblivion which was crowded with white people who all seemed to know each other but were quite oblivious to my presence. On a wall was a slide show of Before/After pictures of boys/Men which included, to my genuine surprise, some of my over achieving best friends who are now in foreign countries. It then occurred to me that I was in the middle of a Rondebosch Boys High 10 year reunion. In my euphoria I had somehow slipped out of my own life and found myself watching the lives of others flash before me.

The next day, the Saturday morning, was bright and loud with chart music shows on the radio. There was the potjiekos to shop for with the potjies already in the boot of the car. Then, just as I was about to make for the butchery for the oxtail, the woman who runs my life asked for cash for the groceries.

“Baby, could I have R100 to get some stuff from the SPAR” she asked.

“What about the R100 I gave you yesterday?” I responded with a suspicion that this accountant can’t do simple maths.

“No you gave me R100 but that was a tip for the pole dancer, remember?”

Big sigh from me now. “No”. (In South Africa, you begin all openings in an argument with the word no). “I gave you R100 for the pole dancer and R100 for you as cash in hand. REMEMBER?”

“No you didn’t. You only gave me R100. All the money you gave me I put in the underwear of the pole dancer as a tip. I have no money on me”.

“What?” I burst out in disbelief. “Did you count the money before you gave it to her?”

“No I didn’t”

“No but you’re an accountant. And even if you ain’t, if someone gives you money, you always count it first”

“No baby I am sure you only gave me R100…I am sure of it”.

“No but I definitely took out R200 from your account. So where did the other R100 go?”

And then with flash of insight she turns to me and says “No. What about that R100 you said you found in the trash can? Are you sure you didn’t put it there?” she says and then bursts into laughter.

“Hey its not funny. So it is either I blew R100 of our own money on drinks OR you gave R200 to a pole dancer as a tip”

“So which is it?”

“No. I don’t want to know”.

An Army in the Woods

There is a town on the edge of a continent, next to a mountain by the sea. In the shadow of the mountain is a stretch of castles in a forest, with moats and gardens all divided and connected with railroads and caroads. At dawn the sun shows its head just above the mountain tops and beams it rays under the tree tops, reflecting brilliantly off the castles shiny panels. On queue, the castles let open their heavy gates and the castle patriarchs emerge with stubble on their chin and slippers on their feet to feed their gardens with pipes and water.

My eyes open just before the phone begins its angry song. I take the few moments to distinguish between dream and life. I must make a choice. I want the dream. But then the phone begins its song. And so the phone, which I programmed, has forced me to make a choice and I choose life. I open the tap to the radio and let in a whole lot of life. Scandals, political interference and well documented human ineptitude. A shower, a shit, a shave and a careful selection of clothes. Somehow, no matter how carefully I select them, I never look much different from one week to the next. But I must not to wake up the woman in the bed. She too must make her choice soon. Sometimes I think it is harder for her to choose.

When the sparrows begin their songs of love and war, the engines of rail and road are loud and roaring. Trains and speed-cars complete their journey from far away plains, to the waking forest. From these transport machines come men and children. The men for work the kids for school, each equally for tiresome toil. After them, come the Eve’s, to work for the Madam’s.

I don’t want to miss assembly outside the fence. I am not sure if the grass needs that much water but it is a pity to not be among the men in various stages of social decay watering the grass in the front yard. It was Gift however, not the men in their shorts and slippers, who suggested I get a hosepipe. Gift the ad hoc gardener. That is what I shall call him, an ‘ad hoc gardener’. He was persistent. I clean for you boss. Make nice for you. I come every week. I should have told him from the start there was not much money for him. But I let him come again the next Saturday. There was work to be done after all. Get a hose pipe he said . I will make the garden nice. But then he did his own thing and not what was asked of him. He wouldn’t take instructions from my girlfriend either. He thought I was the boss. I should have said that it isn’t my house and it isn’t my car either. But no, I was the boss to whom he looked up to. Somehow, in his eyes he seemed to see a long remunerative engagement.

Gift would not take the money. It wasn’t enough he said. Is this a game? That was what he asked. He said I said R150. I said it was R100 last week and so it is this week. He said he had done more work. He gave the money back and stormed out. Then he returned with the neighbour, Alex, from across the busy street as an impromptu council. Alex said Take the money but Gift was too proud. Later Gift took his money. Days later, talking to Alex by the street, he said These guys they can cause you so much trouble. You try be nice to them hey, and the just throw it in your face. These guys they always here. I see them. There by the shop on the corner. They just sit all day, waiting for work. Once, I went up to them and said I have a small job for you. Won’t take you half the day, for R50. This guy just said no. He didn’t want. I told him instead of you just sitting here, come do some work. But nothing.

One day, Tobre comes home to find the side gate forced open and the latch broken. The walls have been breached! The hose pipe is missing. The one I got on Gift’s advice after the altercation. She thinks it is Gift but I am weary of a quick verdict. But then again he did say God will make it fair before he stormed out. It does not matter. I bought another hosepipe. I don’t want to miss assembly in the morning.

Everyday men come to seek you out. They ask for transport money, donations for sports events, small jobs, cigarettes or just any small job. But the school kids and the Eve’s, they just walk on by for the train or the speed-cars. At the end of the day, when the shadow of the mountain creeps over the forest and the castles, the army moves out and the patriarchs come to assembly to water their gardens again.

All The Kings Horse’s

There comes a time when you take a good hard look at your life and decide that you can do better. One such time was last Saturday before the braai that evening for my birthday. Nothing motivates me to get the house clean than the prospect of multiple visitors on their way to make a mess of your home with chicken left overs and disposable cups.

Not that I would otherwise be content in absolute squalor at this point in time, for I have to keep up with a fastidious girlfriend. Already that morning I had had to get hired help in the garden to keep up with my girlfriends cleaning at the crack of dawn. But apart from the pitch battles of house chores with the girlfriend (She says “Baby, did you take out the garbage” to which i reply “No, but I just washed the dishes” to which she says “Ja, but I cooked the dinner, did the shopping and replaced the light bulbs”) there is the need for me to assert my presence in this house.

For a start, I could not bear to have those bookish and socially progressive friends of mine from university find that I am living off the generosity of my girlfriend whose work ethic and property is the bounty of generations of underprivileged working mothers. No! They must instead think that we are instead partners, and that while I may come across as a dilettante at the university, I am actually a supportive and understanding partner to a genuine contributing member of the that very real dog-eat-dog world. They must not find my clothes stuffed in a travelling bag in the corner of the room, but instead  folded and stacked in cupboards and drawers alongside those of the one with gainful employment. They must not find my books sprawled across the bed in the spare room but instead stacked alphabetically in the living room alongside the girlfriend’s DVDs for all to admire. They should find a peaceful kingdom with two subjects living as equals with the paraphernalia to show it.

So then, my girlfriend and I took it upon ourselves to rearrange and organise the house. In this task I found within my self some resolve and a sense of wisdom. As an outsider I could claim great insights about the configurations of furniture and the distribution of light. “The bed should go here because when you wake up in the morning, what you want is to do this and see that” I commanded while pointing. “The dressing table should be here”, “Your mothers TV should go to the garage”,”Lets bring yours sister’s drawers into our room since she is in London all year anyway” and so on. But there was real work in this. It involved dusting, packing and re-packing, carrying, folding, tucking and quite a bit of arguing. Just as well Tobre had a visitor else I never would have been able to have things my way while she entertained the guest with chit-chat about the office over tea.

And you know, I think some good came out of it all. We were both so pleased with ourselves. There seemed more space in the two bedrooms. Bedside tables and a chest of drawers for each of us. My books stacked nicely in the display cabinet for all to see. They say a change is a holiday and we had all the excitement of the outward bound journey. Where were all the guests I wondered, they must see it. They must see the open plan kitchen, the french doors, the wooden floors and they must see that I am in the centre of all of this. Where were they all as it was six o-clock already, the scheduled time for those over educated friends to arrive. But just then, Tobre disappeared to neighbours to give thanks for a favor passed. Marooned in the neat and clean house, I soon followed her.

Out the front of the house I went, through the still quite messy garden (I must have a word with that Gift), through our as yet unfinished boundary fence and out onto the municipal grass by the roadside and then up to a large arch holding a black galvanised iron gate, complete with intercom. Buzzed in I went passed a very shiny black car and came to an imposing hardwood studded door as wide as a piano that swung open as I approached. And there on a sprawling leather sofa was my girlfriend in the throws of laughter with the neighbour, Shamima. This room, the Landing, with its large square tiles and cool pastel grey walls opened where a large window opened to brilliant green foliage from the yard.

“We were just talking about you” said Shamima, a little exhausted from the laugther.

“I am sure you were, you are laughing after all” I said.

“No man! We were just talking about you and that garden of yours in the front” she said.

“Oh that. Well…I am not finished” I replied.

“Oh don’t worry about it Jumani, I know. Our garden was terrible for a long time with all the builders causing such a mess” she said.

“Well it looks fine now” Tobre said.”The house I mean, not the garden, there is not much garden left now that your house goes right to the front gate” she continued. Then Tobre said to me “This house is huge, have you seen the rest of the house?”

“No” I replied.

“You haven’t seen it? Haven’t you been here before?” asked Shamima.

“Why no, you have never invited me”.

“Oh don’t talk crap man. Come, come see…..oh get up and come see you silly boy”

“I was just enjoying the feel of this wonderful couch. I’m coming” I said and joined them through the next door into the centre of the house.

There we saw such magnificent splendor like I had never seen. As Shamima marched up and down pointing at this and that we saw the resplendent and shiny ochre orange varnished and waxed wood floor (the same wood our house next door but incomparable) More leather furniture. A huge flat screen TV. A large dark wood dinning table. A row of bedrooms each with a TV and built-in cupboards. And through one of the doors in the cupboard in each room is a concealed bathroom with toilet and shower (which compares well with out single bathroom). Large french doors opening to a swimming pool past a stoep with a built in braai unit. In the largest room was a dark wood sleigh bed with two beside tables to match. Shamima described it all in a matter of fact way but the wind in my chest was gone. There was not a hint space wastage with over sized rooms and neither was there cluttered furniture. All was neat, colour coordinated and well lit. “It is like going from a [informal settlement] khayelitsha to the 12 Apostles [hotel]” Tobre remarked.

“Come visit anytime” Shamima beamed with a smile as she let us out through the archway with a click on the intercom. “Your always welcome”

“Careful what you offer” I said in response.

We got back to our door before Tobre said “Well baby, at least our clothes are folded”.

A Gift Horse

Morning came. I was alone in bed. Where could she be I wondered? I heard the sound of crockery scrapping and water splashing. She is doing dishes, already! This will mean that I have to tidy up the house then, else it will seem as if she has done all the chores and I will just be the lazy boyfriend who lies in bed until way after the sun has come up just a week after I have moved in only. So then I pull myself out the bed only to find that the computer has been tidied away and so have my clothes, books and shoes. Damn!

But alas, the front yard is a right mess. The weeds have taken over from the last half hearted attempt at gardening 6 months ago, the herbs are parched and there is paper and plastic lying about, blown in from the street. It could take all day to sort out the front yard. But that is exactly what I need. An insurmountable task to which I can martar myself. Just a few months ago, however, me simply squating to remove a weed would earn me heaps of praise, for then I could be the boyfriend who sometimes helps out in the yard (wow!). But now that I live here, simply pulling out a weed will not do. More is expected. I need to make an impact. In fact, what is needed is systematic garden reform, if not a whole horticultural revolution.

And so, right then and there, in my boxers and t-shirt, to the background sound of crockery splashing in soapy water, I began to pull weeds out the soil. A most satisfactory task, I must say. I simply hold the leaves and stalk of the weed at the base and tug whence the plant gives and out comes a length of root as long as the weed was tall. Not the same in my home country. There, you can’t pull a weed out for beer or money. I would sooner yank out copper ore, as some people continue to do to this day. But still, with all this pulling of weeds out my girlfriends front yard, I was not making much of an impression as a whole. You see, I was want to pull out the most outlandishly brazen and haughty of weeds first. By this I mean my eye would catch the sight of a coterie of tall and well  formed weeds and I’ll be determined to yank them all out. But before I would be halfway through with that patch would I see another insurrection of weeds over my shoulder and proceed to them to yank them out. And so on I went, in circles about the garden, without actually getting much done. This besides the raking, sweeping and watering to be done.

An hour later, as I began to flounder at the enormity of the task came Gift. A small man with the body of a boy except for his beard. “Boss, have you got any small job for me”. In my boxers and t-shirt, I quickly put on my I-am-sorry-I-have-no-money-or-job-for-you face. But then his gaze turned to take in the spectacle around me. A sparcle came to his eye. “I can do this garden for you nice boss. I remove the leaves and weeds, move the flowers, put the grass, make the whole thing nice for you boss”. Sweat streaming down my face and the garden faring no better after an hours work I relented. “How much do you want for it?” I replied.

And so it was then that the girlfriend returned from some errand in her shiny car to find that I had hired a man to do my chores for me. She was kind and said “I was just thinking the same thing”. I still had a card to play, however. I made a full English breakfast, with frieds eggs, bacon and all. But then as we ate there was Gift sweating in the sun in full view to us through the window. So I had to make breakfast for him too.