Like it Matters (2 page)

“Want to get ice cream and sit on the beach?” I said.

She stopped walking and she looked at me. Plain as anything I could tell that the whole time we’d been quiet, she’d been far away. And battling. It was probably a pang, and bad thoughts came with it, and it was just for a second, but she had the most hounded, wounded look on her face and I couldn’t help it—

I put my hand up to touch her—

But then I couldn’t actually do it, and I just dug my hand into my hair and it felt like my scalp was on fire I was so embarrassed.

“Ice cream on the beach?” she said. “Are you six years old?”

“No, I’m just new here.”

Half a smile.

“I don’t have any money,” she said.

“I’ve got a bit.”

“I’m not allowed to have money anymore.”

“Ja,” I said. “I tried that once as well.”

We found a soft-serve caravan parked near the beach, and we got two and went down to the sand. It was the worst soft serve in the world—warm and creamy and it tasted like weak milkshake, and it came in one of those cheap pink cones that was so stale it was impossible to chew. And you had to fucking nurse the thing with your other hand so sand didn’t blow on it.

“You don’t have to eat it,” I told her.

“Breakfast,” she said.

The beach was empty except for some surfers and fishermen and homeless guys. The sea was a bleak colour, and full of broken waves

And it was a really long way from being light or fun or romantic or anything like that

But it still felt like pure grace to be out there with her. Mostly we were quiet, but we talked for a while about the places I’d lived and about a holiday she’d had in Namibia when she was a kid, and between that and the sound of the waves a whole hour went by, the most peaceful hour I’d had in months.

When she said she needed to go I asked her if it was okay if I walked her home. We got off the beach and went along the road that goes past the super tubes and then we crossed and started winding our way into the suburbs. We walked for a couple of blocks and then she said, “Actually, here. Put this on.”

From the pocket of her hoodie she brought out some stuff—a couple of pamphlets, a kind of form with signatures on it, a badge that said
FEELING GOOD!

And two plastic bracelets.

She put the other stuff back in her pocket, and then she took my hand and wrapped the band around my wrist and hooked the plastic over the stud. Then she held out her hand and I had to do the same—my fingers all hot and clumsy around her cool, small wrist.

My bracelet was dark turquoise, hers was orange.

“Did you choose the colours?” I said.

“Painstakingly.”

“So if anyone asks, I’m your sponsor?”

“They keep telling me I have to get one. You don’t want to be?”

“But this doesn’t have your number on it,” I said. I couldn’t do it with a straight face, though.

She laughed. “Smooth,” she said. “But I’m not allowed a phone anymore.”

We went a few more blocks and then we got to a corner with a thick, parched jasmine bush and we stopped. “My aunt lives down here,” she said. “If I don’t get there before twelve she calls my dad.”

“Okay. My name’s Ed, by the way.”

“Okay. I’m Charlotte.”

I asked her, “Am I going to see you again?”

“I go to meetings all the time,” she said, smiling and turning And walking away.

That night, I had the kind of dream I told myself I’d write down as soon as I woke up.

It was a new thing I was doing, and I’d started it out of a growing sense that that was the only great trade about living sober—that and money. More dreams you could remember and a bit of extra cash, and that was it.

I was wide awake but I didn’t move for a while, I just lay there and let the dream settle. It left a lingering, clammy feeling on my skin. Finally I forced myself out of bed, and on my hands and knees in the dark, I found my pen and the little notebook I was using for the dreams and then I crawled back into bed and I put on the lamp

And I turned to a brand-new page and I put the date and I wrote:

I
T MIGHT
’
VE BEEN ROCK BOTTOM
, I’
M NOT SURE
. I guess it all depends on if you can have more than one.

Whatever it was, I’d been inching down towards it for years. Inching down and inching down, and then finally the big slide—and once you’re scrabbling, I promise, you go down so fast …

I’d been working for about a year at the Castle Bar. I was living in a very cheap room in Cauvin Road, writing and sketching things during the day—not always high—before walking down the hill to get to work every evening. I was managing to save a bit of money here and there, and at least for me, my life was in a pretty good rhythm

Until the night Phil showed up at the bar.

Phil I knew from Grahamstown—he went to one of the rich boarding schools but we’d see each other most weekends—and he was probably the closest thing to a good friend I ever had. Our interests always seemed to dovetail on the issue of getting fucked up. We’d try sneak into bars, we’d cop a bag off a car guard now and then, we’d get a friend of Phil’s to steal some of his mom’s Lexotans for us—

Pretty regular stuff, I guess—

Except he was the one I ran to when I skipped town when I was nineteen with a bag full of stolen drugs in my dad’s car.

He was my first port of call in Cape Town and he helped me sell the shit off to this elegant guy Ken, who ran a drughouse in Salt River called The Rainbow Lodge and who fucked us over a bit with his prices, but not nearly as much as he could’ve.

Phil and I lived together for months after that and we had money and obviously we didn’t sell
all
of the drugs, and I really do remember us being happy. Until one day we had a massive fight because he’d left the back door open and the house had flooded and the box full of my mom’s books got damaged—I still hadn’t unpacked them because I wanted to get a proper shelf, and I was probably more angry with myself than anything else

But I stormed out with my bag that day and we hadn’t seen each other since—

It’d been six years

Six years

But we caught up at the Castle Bar that night and for a while it was good, friendly and innocent—for maybe an hour—and then Phil started steering the conversation down all the old roads.

He started asking me about cocaine. Quite casually at first, but then the more he drank, the more I could tell he was getting into the idea.

Living in Cauvin Road, I had some neighbours I could call on. One guy, especially—Ricardo. He ran a little shop of horrors on the top floor of the block with the mural of the lady with the afro and the boom box, and he owed me good prices because once I helped him destroy his car—it was part of an insurance scam and it worked out fucking well. I picked a bag up from Ricardo, no problem, and I brought it back down for Phil and he totally overpaid me for it and then disappeared and I barely saw him again for the rest of the night.

But then Phil came to the bar again. And then again and again and again—it must’ve been the tenth time he came in and I ducked off to Ricardo’s place for him when, finally, as I handed him the bag in the staff toilets, he said, “You’re not keen to join, hey, Ed?”

It was so quiet that night there were times Phil and I were basically alone in the bar, and that bag didn’t even make it through my shift. Phil was talking a lot. He was on a bit of a self-pitying theme, even though his life sounded
great
, and it was bothering me. I knew it wasn’t completely his fault—problems are problems, sure—but still, I think I got that thing Satan had in
Paradise Lost

A sense of injured merit

And I was purposefully zoning out whenever I could. I’d look right at him and just sing to myself in my head.

But after the last little shot off the edge of Phil’s bank card, he was telling me about this house he’d moved into in Rondebosch, with people he barely knew and didn’t like, and how all of a sudden everything had become
his
job. “Like,” he said, “there’s this flat in the garden.
Kak
. Kak little flat. But the rest of the house is fucking kiff so we need to get someone in that flat to help us pay for the rest of the house. Four grand a month. Shit,” he said. “I spend that on coke.”

And that was it

An idea fired in a sour brain—he pays my rent, I get him coke—and he did nothing to temper it. In fact, in exchange for stopping by Cauvin Road and picking up another gram, he said he’d drive me back to Rondebosch that night.

There was nothing wrong with the flat. It was great, it was perfect—it had a bed and a little desk, then a small bathroom with a toilet that worked and its own fucking shower. There was even a bar fridge in there, I just had to plug it in.
God, if this is kak
, I thought,
don’t even let me see the house.

And I slept deeper that night than I could remember for ages.

But the day after—he must’ve had a beast of a hangover, if it was half as bad as mine—Phil came in to chat to me about everything and it looked like he wasn’t so sure anymore.

He gave me all kinds of reasons, but I saw what it was.

It was that no one else who knew him—like in the house, for sure, but maybe even beyond—knew that he did coke.

It was plain, and I saw it the whole way along.

I focused on that. I promised him I’d keep it cool and I did everything I could to convince him. I reminded him about how I got to Cape Town in the first place, how I’d run away and how I was still pretty sure no one knew where I was, really, not my dad, and no one from town. I told him, “Fuck, Phil, my whole
life’s
basically a kind of secret I keep from other people. I’m
good
at it, man—”

And finally he gave in, and I guess he sealed it by telling me, “When you go out later to get the rest of your stuff, bring some back.”

And it was working out so well—

I managed to move a Congolese guy into my old flat and handed over the keys and I never went back to the bar, and to fill my days I was going to a couple of Phil’s classes for him because he couldn’t be fucked. I’d take his car up to that little ivy-covered planet tucked in there against the mountain and I’d sit in lectures and then go spend hours sitting on the steps, watching the most beautiful people in the world keep streaming by. And all I had to do in return was take a drive up to Ricardo’s place on the way home and then a pretty edgy one back to Rondebosch with a balloon of coke sandwiched between two pairs of underpants.

It was a good trade and I don’t regret it

But it all changed one afternoon in October—one cold rainy day, when the earth gave way—and from there, it was just falling and falling …

I’d taken Phil’s car up to campus and then I’d stopped in at Ricardo’s, and I was on my way home but then at the robots in Mowbray, where the n2 merges with Main Road, there was a red light

And it was raining hard, the wipers were going flat-out and the windows were misting up

And there’re always so many bums hanging out at those traffic lights—

But this time, knocking on my window, long hair, long beard, wearing a trash bag against the downpour

Did he just shout “Ed”?

Jesus—

Dad?

That’s my fucking dad
, I thought, just as the light changed to green and some guy behind me started hooting.

But how?

What’s he doing in Cape Town?

I don’t remember driving home to Rondebosch, but I had to get out and open the gate and then close it again when I got there—and I remember even in those two short little bursts getting soaked by the rain, and going into my room wet and cold and sweating at the same time