Cruel Crazy Beautiful World (6 page)

Jabulani surveys the barren land around him. No chance of running without being gunned down.

A whip cracks. Jabulani jumps.

– Hey! This is not the beach. Dig or you’ll feel the bite of my mamba.

The cowboy snarls his teeth into a gleeful sneer at the sight of the tenderfoot swinging his pick with gusto.

– That albino’s the devil, a Poleman whispers to Jabulani. We call him Ghost Cowboy.

H
ERMANUS MARKET. AFTERNOON.

I catch sight of the seagull girl feeling and smelling oranges. My scalp tingles. My heart beats a snare-drum riff.

The fruit seller drops his chant to gawp at her. He skins a litchi with otter fingers and hands her the white ball.

From this angle I can’t see her put it in her mouth.

He holds out a hand, palm up, for the stone.

I abandon my stall to see.

She bows to spit the stone into his hand.

He pockets it. Then he peels an orange and gives her a quarter.

I imagine juice seeping from her lips, for she wipes her chin with the heel of her hand. She nods at him.

He is over the moon. Winking theatrically, he fingers oranges as if fondling breasts. Cocky swine.

She laughs at his antics and signals she’ll have half a dozen. A hand and a thumb.

He twists the paper bag as he hands it to her.

She drifts from stand to stand. Now she frivolously puts a sun hat on her head and tilts her head to see herself in a mirror. Now she stands to look at a guy in dangling dreads lazily juggling sticks. They are the things they call devil sticks, bound in rubber from bicycle tyres. Her eyes shake the dreadlock dude out of his torpid daze and now he makes his sticks sky-dance. She laughs at his dreads writhing like spiked snakes.

I pick up my guitar and sing Dylan in a bid to lure her away from him.

She heads my way, swinging her paper bag of oranges.

My heart beats hard.

Behind her, the jilted dreadlock dude catches his sticks and skims his hand off his ass at me for cutting in on his act.

Now the seagull girl stands in front of me. Her toenails are painted blue.

My voice drops out of key. I glance at Hunter, who reads all in a moment and frowns at me to focus.

– You play beautifully.

The girl’s voice is limpid as the sound of a penny whistle, fresh as lemongrass, sweet as acacia honey.

I lay down my guitar. The uncut strings beyond the keys quiver like moth feelers.

She lets her fingers fondle the wire-and-bead animals. Each animal pulses to life under her fingertips. A penguin wags its stubby tail. A chameleon unfurls its fizzy tongue. A turtle tilts its head. She lifts a seahorse to the sky. Sunlight glints in the beads. The spine fin blurs like a hummingbird’s wings. And as her fingers glide on, the animals freeze again.

I no longer see them as mere trinkets to hawk for Zero but as things with soul.

– How much do you want for this seahorse?

No words flow from my lips.

– They go for a hundred, Hunter pipes up. But maybe you could deal him down just a tad.

I scowl at Hunter.

– You can have him, I tell the seagull girl.

– That’s sweet. But a hundred’s a song for something so magical.

Before handing me the note, she folds it twice over, as if to render the deal less mercenary. Or as if to hand me a pencilled note.

As she goes past the fig tree, she drops an orange in the hobo’s hands and bends to pat his dog.

I am dazed beyond all cure.

– You can’t just give your wares away, Hunter scolds me.

– Isn’t she a goddess?

– See her float, Hunter mocks. Catch her before she kites off.

Then her voice goes all minor key:

– I was beautiful once.

My eyes slide away.

I see a young black man running across the market square as if the devil is after him. He trips and falls hard at the feet of the seagull girl. His mouth gapes, as if to tell her something. Maybe to beg her to pluck out the knife sticking into his spine. Instead, he spits blood on her sandalled feet.

The bag of oranges falls. The bag splits and oranges scatter. There’s an eerie hiatus before her voice skirls over the market.

The dreadlock dude’s devil sticks fall.

The fruit seller abandons his chant between syllables.
Liii ...

I feel as if I am running underwater, through kelp. I can hardly swing my feet.

The hobo professor catches her as she falls. He lays her head down in the green-tinted shade of his fig tree. Her hair spills like that of Venus coming out of the sea. Moonfleet sniffs at her.

I tug off my T-shirt and slide it under her head.

A man comes out of the Fisherman’s Cottage with a glass in hand.

I beg him for the glass. I tip out the liquid and lemon rind and catch a cube of ice in my hand. I slide ice over her forehead and along her arms. By now we are surrounded by a throng of gazers who frown at my zany method. Once the ice melts, my fingers ghost over her skin.

In my mind her skin’s a flawless canvas. I paint in pale-pink nipples and her navel, a comma halving the flat plane between the parentheses of her hips.

The bleeding man writhes wordlessly. His head is pooled in blood.

How can I conjure fantasies of a girl while a man’s life bleeds away? How come folk all tune in to her fate rather than his?

Only now the man from the Fisherman’s Cottage goes to call an ambulance.

And the dreadlock dude tugs the knife out. Then he stabs it into the fig tree and wipes his hands on his jeans.

And the hobo has a shot at plugging the wound with his hands.

I feel a ripple under the seagull girl’s skin. Her eyelids flicker and lift subtly and her eyes glint through narrow slits before her lids fall again. Then, suddenly, her eyelids peel apart to reveal her lagoon-green eyes. I smile at her but she stares through me. I want to kiss the hint of squint lines fanning out from the corner of her eyes, or the cinnamon stipples along her cheekbones.

Now other folk cart her away to the Burgundy Hotel. I feel as if they want to pluck her white skin away from my coloured hands.

Now the man’s dead and the stabbed fig tree weeps white sap and the hobo’s hands are stained red.

I pick up my T-shirt. I find a thread of her hair, virile as horsehair. I fiddle it round a finger and hold it up to the sun. Then I cover the head of the dead man with my T-shirt.

Around me folk voice their verdict on the murder. How this is proof of a country going to the dogs. How he must have done something dodgy.

The professor rifles through the man’s pockets and finds a tatty, warped passport.

– He’s from Zim.

– Just another refugee, says the fruit seller.

Moonfleet laps at the pool of clotting blood.

– We are all refugees in this land, tunes the professor to his dog.

Then he clicks bloody fingers and they go: the professor’s earflaps flapping, a tatty string dangling from his pocket, Moonfleet’s tail tillering through the wind.

A siren yowls at an impervious sun.

At my stall again, I hide the seagull girl’s hair in a book:
Of Love and Other Demons
.

I put on my rugby jersey (always on hand for when the wind picks up).

– This town’s not just whales and hibiscus, Hunter remarks. Things can get hazardous.

I forget my luck in finding a memento of her and slide into sorrow for this land where a man is killed for the sin of being foreign.

A
FARM SOMEWHERE SOUTH
of the Limpopo. Dusk.

A hare hops across the veld and the gunmen drop their guns to trap it.

Ghost Cowboy slides from his saddle to join in the sport.

Each time the hare darts for a gap they flap scarecrow hands.

Ghost Cowboy flings a stone. The hare flinches as the stone
thups
into fur-hidden bone.

The men laugh.

Out of the corner of his eye Jabulani sees a Poleman run. His eyes pan to follow him. Behind him he hears the
haw-hawing
of the men and the dull tattoo of stones finding their mark.

He turns to see blood seeping through quivering fur.

Ghost Cowboy catches sight of the fleeing man and vaults onto his horse.

Ghost Cowboy fells him with one shot from his long gun.

The Zimbabwean cartwheels in the dust.

The horse’s front hooves dance around the baying head of the fallen man. The horseman coolly fires another shot from the saddle. The man’s head jerks before the bullet whiplashes in Jabulani’s ears.

The horseman nooses the man’s foot and tows him through the dust.

The gunmen order the Polemen to fling him onto the back of the Land Rover. For the crocodiles.

Then the Polemen sing again to the rhythm of the falling picks. They are not yet dead, so they sing. They sing of the sight of their village when they journey home by train after a long exile. They sing of the healing, humid balm of a woman’s hips. They sing of the magic in the dancing feet of a young girl.

Far to the north, across the Limpopo, a woman senses her man died a dry, bitter death and a wail pipes from her lips to the sun.

H
ERMANUS. ANOTHER SUNUP.

Seagulls mewl and loop in a mother-of-pearl sky. Sparrows chirrup cheerily in the frangipani.
Dassies
drift out of hiding.

The seagull girl comes out of the white house, bread in hand.

Sparrows take flight as she floats towards the frangipani.

She comes to a standstill, bamboozled by this wonder. The frangipani’s fingers bear a myriad of vivid oranges.

I stay hiding in the
fynbos
. I laugh in my soul at the sight of her rubbing her eyes.

She picks one of the oranges and handles it as if to prove it is not dreamt. She tosses the orange up and catches it, tosses it up and catches it.

I hear the sweet smack of the rind in her palm. She looks at me without seeing me.

As she comes out of the gate, she drops the orange into a pocket of her dress.

She flings bread to the gulls and
dassies
, then holds out a hand for the sparrows to peck from. All the while she casts her eyes about in the hope of unravelling the enigma of the frangipani.

When the bread is all gone she walks down the stone steps to the tidal pool.

At the edge of the pool she peels down to a jade bikini. Tattooed angel wings arc from her shoulder blades to flirt with the hem of her low-slung bikini. The tenuous string of her bikini top stops her wings from unfurling to fly her, a girl Icarus, away over the blind blue deep of Walker Bay.

I flinch at the thought of the tattoo needle sliding its black blood under her skin.

She dives headlong into the pool. The water warps her outline, forming sine-wave contours as she glides under the surface. She comes up gasping from the cold. Then she swims butterfly out to the far wall. With each forward swing of her arms, her wings slope up out of the water. I suck in a gasp of sea air at each sighting of her wings.

A high rogue wave sends fizzing foam over the wall, now to hide her from my eyes, now to reveal again her sinuous curves as the fizz fades. At the wall she does an oh-so-tidy flip turn, heels tucked to her sweet jade ass.

I feel faint.

Now she floats on the surface, fanning her toes to the sky the way hollow-boned old men do on the Dead Sea. She yields to the whim of ebb and fetch, and each time I fear she’ll be sucked out to sea by an ebbing wave, another wave sweeps over the wall.

On this edge of the tidal pool it is merely the slight heft of an orange that keeps the wind from filching her flimsy dress.

I run on past the tidal pool, out to the flat, hard sand by the lagoon. I duck when a screaming gull dives down at me from the sky. It circles, then swoops again. This time its webbed claws graze my hands as I hood my scalp. I dart away from the dunes where the gull’s eggs huddle in some hidden hollow.

A
FARM SOMEWHERE SOUTH
of the Limpopo. Dusk.

They play football on hard, foot-mortared sand behind the farmhouse. The ball is shot far beyond the rickety posts.

Jabulani follows the ball into the
bundu
and a shot sings past his ear. He flings himself down in the dust.

The other Zimbabweans laugh. They have all had their turn to piss their pants for fetching a stray ball without a nod from the gunmen.

The gunmen put two crates of cold beer down. Before long the upbeat banter of the Zimbabweans is about football and girls. None allude to their shot countryman. None glance at the crocodile pond for fear of sighting a bone or foot.

The cold glass is soothing in Jabulani’s skinned palms.

Beyond him he hears the yelps of the children of the gunmen cavorting in the swimming pool. He craves the thought of gliding underwater as he used to in the school pool on weekends. He hears the rhythmic
dup dup
of a tennis ball on a tennis court. The sound recalls the
thupping
of stone into hare hide.

A peacock cries
caaaoooow
.

Jonas swings a
panga
blade down. A watermelon falls into gaping red hemispheres. He deftly slices it up.

The men flaunt absurd green Picasso grins as they gnaw at the watermelon rind.

A black girl carries a crate of beer to the gunmen. She wears no shirt. She is young.

The gunmen smirk at her bobbling breasts as she twists the lids off the beer bottles. Scarface pinches her ass.

Ghost Cowboy signals to Jabulani to come over.

He jogs up to the gunmen and the girl.

– Yes?

– Yes, master, Ghost Cowboy snarls.

– Yes, master.

– Do you find this girl pretty?

– She is pretty.

– Master.

– Master.

– Would you fuck her? baits Scarface.

– She’s just a girl.

Ghost Cowboy squeezes a breast in his hand till she flinches from pain.

– She’s ripe as a mango, tunes Ghost Cowboy.

– You are not a good man, master.

All the other white men guffaw.

–
Woooah
. You gonna go to hell, hey? Hey, hey? taunts Scarface.