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”.