The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories (5 page)

He is still underwater; he shoots back up again, gulping for air. Where is she, he wonders, and sees her on the escalator at Joburg's airport. Who is she going to meet? Back on the campus, before she left, when she said they must talk, it was always just ‘him'; she never told him the guy's name.

It doesn't matter now. Nothing matters. His phone is at home, switched off. He told his parents he was going away for the weekend. How long would it be before they realised?

He ducks under again, letting the air escape through his nostrils. The bubbles tickle his nose. A screaming in his ears, panic. And Julia disentangling herself, standing up, giggling as she says: ‘I think I found a dead body over here!'

 

The first time I saw him, it was on the corner of Richmond and Stone. The red of his jacket (uncomfortable for this time of year) had interrupted my path down to the foreshore. And there must have been a story there that drew me closer.

The bench he sat on was the tallest thing for kilometres and stood in what, I'd later learn, used to be his living room. His home, he said, had long since been reduced to rubble, though I could know it only as a small section of an entire suburb levelled to dust. Squares of gravel appeared everywhere as accidental markers of the houses that had once been there, now a ward of unnumbered lots. I had always imagined that from above they would look like the winelands in grayscale, though coarser, less defined.

He told me he could have taken Wilbur Smith to the Company's Gardens on that occasion or watched other people's dogs at the promenade but he didn't have the energy to stretch the roots of the public transport system that far that day, nor to test the limits of his aged legs. Instead, he sat making sense of the remaining absence, noticing how this suburb of so many memories had become interstitial – a place to pass through; the route of taxis avoiding the M3 during rush hour; the subject of high-school history. This was a path he thought he knew, he said, though he was certain he had not travelled it before.

Their living room, he explained to me, doubled up as a shop front for the bakery that his father operated from an extension to the family's kitchen. An automatic bread slicer (like pulling the arm on fruit machines – cherries, 7, double BAR!) stood permanently next to the family's coffee table, its vibrations always threatening to wobble the radio to that final step over the edge. He described school photos next to it, a wedding album, miniature animals from a broken printer's tray. Funeral portraits of a great-grandmother and a great-grandfather were there, somewhere, too. But how many of these were things he remembered and how many were items from the memories of others?

He used to collect the crumbs from the base of the bread machine to share with a group of pigeons that showed up regularly on the front stoep. He thought of them as a handful of converted gryshemde, though less disciplined and rather poorly dressed. Sometimes, when nobody was looking, he poked small holes in the bottom of the shop's brown-paper packets, so that his father's customers were forced unknowingly to share the seeds of their purchases. He couldn't imagine why people would mind dropping the bits they would never eat, but he already knew humans as selfish and he sensed that he would be in trouble if he was found out.

He imagined that each day it was the same birds, a tight-knit group of friends and family. Some he even called by name, recognising familiar speckles, stamps of an unlikely pedigree. The seagulls, the bigger birds, he chased away. Their markings were ugly to him, their beaks comical and unreal. He was also sensitive to their sharp voices, preferring the moments just after and in between the soft grumbling of his pigeons. He best noticed the beauty of sound in its immediate absence, he said. So it was with the Noon Day Gun, and the bells from Church Street, the echo of their tolling more effective, he thought, at summoning God.

His most regular customer was an albino so pale his feathers gave off a harsh glint in the city light. It was necessary to squint gently when looking at him, like looking for depth in a painting. The bird he called Frank, after falling in love with ‘The Girl from Ipanema' over a game of
Snap with a cousin at the corner shop
. Years later, his two bop went not to losing to his cousin but to bootlegged arcade games like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Street Fighter II, swallowed whole by greedy machines. Frank was naturally part of the resistance, had always been; his coat was his own. As a boy, he found comfort in Frank's difference, for it meant that to stand out could also be natural.

As an only child, lonely even when surrounded by people, he came to look for patterns in things, arranging pieces of twigs to mimic the clouds, watching for order in the leaves turning in the wind. It was the small realisations that later almost broke him, he said, the discovery that his order was imposed.

He told me all of this with both hands tight between his legs, his face tilted slightly downwards, the body language of the guilty. It seemed to me that a part of him always regretted coming here, but I was too young to know that homecomings are ambiguous.

When I saw him, which was not to say every day, I approached slowly so that I would know when it was best to turn away and continue along my own route. Often I avoided him, knowing that he could not choose to avoid me. Was it simply my presence that I thought would so disturb him, my eagerness to turn him into company? Or that he had made himself forget and I was making him remember? Our intimacy, as strangers, was embarrassing.

 

He said he could have moved, like many others, back towards home – to Observatory, Woodstock, Salt River, Bo-Kaap – but Cape Town had put up a Van Riebeek's Hedge which thickened and bristled when it sensed his longing and the more he pushed forward, the more it pushed back, impenetrable, the prick of thorns more vicious each time. He told me he sometimes imagined a bitterness at the back of his throat, the taste of the wild almond, which made him increasingly reluctant and defensive.

The City of Cape Town had taken his cousins out to the low cities (Delft, Rotterdam, The Hague), and him, his immediate family, to Atlantis, the lost city, just one among many others. They wanted them at sea level and below, the parts of the city where no one wanted to be. When it rained the effects were devastating; there was always the possibility of disappearance, the threat of further dissolution. Cape Town had always been better from the forehead up. Later, when the ministry began a policy of removing oaks and pines from the mountain's slopes, it was a second assault, reinserting the people they had removed from these same slopes back under the fold of natural history. And not for the first time, we became the stuff of museums, he said, our DNA seeping through the stacks.

 

When I saw him again it was in a different version of the same place. The bench was metal where it had been wood (the result of one of the City's quick fixes), and shoots of grass were making their way through the stone. I read these as signs of violence rather than hope or rebirth; their presence was angry and forced. He too had changed, the blue of his eyes now stronger in his veins, his cap whiter but more threadbare. And even I was sadder than before.

When his family moved to Atlantis, he told me, he stopped speaking, communicating only via the syllables YES and NO written over on the palms of his hands each morning in thick, black koki – YES on his right, NO on his left. It made the most sense to him that way (right would always be associated with correctness, authenticity, discipline) though he was the only one who really understood. He hated being left-handed. He might dismiss this as a cheap ploy now, or regret having made his parents struggle to connect with him, for heaping struggle upon struggle, or for being called petulant, silly, immature – the worst kinds of insults. Or were they affirmations, reinforcements? But he made up for it now, he said, by being the perfect citizen, as amenable to others as possible. He reduced, reused and recycled.

He knew his new location as Ext 12, as 7349, as not-home. The streets were too wide, the light was harder, and there was no bakery and no bread slicer; nothing was familiar. And, while there were pigeons in 7349, their cooing, too, was different, strangely eerie. He saw no beauty in their inflections, only disappointment. He was tempted to stuff bits of cotton wool in his ears at night, he said, but he felt he deserved to be punished by these morning sounds. That they should be a reminder of the family and friends he had left behind. He spent years in a space whose time he doesn't remember, he said. That bit on the map where there are no lakes, no rivers, no mountains, no roads, few contours.

 

The first time he saw Frank again was on a bench similar to this one. He laughed. Out of politeness, what I didn't say was, All benches are the same. Though perhaps it was just too boring, too obvious to mention; his once-mundane observations gradually becoming more interesting than my best attempts at understanding. I was of three minds, you might say. It wasn't that things changed when Frank showed up, he told me, but rather that he was tired of trying to force his world to remain the same.

He wasn't sitting alone that day, he clarified. There was a girl on the bench next to him, both of them shuffling to the edge of the outermost slat (the radio to the rim of the family table) in a shared awkwardness. He thought he was in love, but the feelings she evoked in him, he said, were now too predictable to relay. Besides, we were both too young to understand, he thought (him then, me now). When Frank landed on the bench top, it was for the first time that he really noticed where he was sitting: the plaque that read ‘Nie-blankes', inevitably stained with bird droppings, old and fresh. It was without irony, with no time for reflection, that he told the girl (or was he addressing the pigeon?), ‘This one doesn't belong here.' And her laughter made him sad, frustrated. It was enough to make him fall out of love, he said.

He walked away from the girl then, but came back for the bird, carrying a wicker basket – a false nest, a fake home. Though I never discovered what he did with Frank, I've always imagined that somehow he took the pigeon back to where he thought it belonged, in the dead of night, alone. I imagine a happy ending but every now and then my mind strays to darker options.

Did he miss Frank, I asked? (We both knew the two birds weren't the same, but like many other things that day, to point this out would have been devastating.) It was the first time I had thought about the feelings of the story and not the story itself.

I sensed our conversation was over only just before it was, the introduced cadences in his voice my most obvious clue. While there were questions I still needed to ask him, more gaps in the story than my mind could bear to fill, I managed to hold back. I remembered that mine was not the company he sought; he had come here for a stillness to wrap around his own thoughts, to be alone with his memories. I thought I noticed a few tiny, white crumbs on his jacket but, thinking back, I'm almost sure I imagined them there. I wanted him to continue to be the man in his stories. I wanted a perfect resolution.

Later I would walk away from him, as he from the girl, with my skirt flapping in the wind. I would turn back momentarily and I would see him lie down on the bench, never quite comfortable, his jacket folded neatly underneath his head as a cushion, letting the warmth of the sun carry him off to sleep.

 

i stopped at a woolworths on my way into town. bought the usual travel fare: biltong, nuts and underpants.

well, i suppose technically they were panties. but god, i hate that word. more than the garment itself, but.

but definitely less than the moment we realised your mother had given my boxers to your brother.

less than the day she asked if i had to dress like this for work.

 

i don't know if she told you, or if you encouraged it, but she emailed me on your honeymoon.

apologising on your behalf.

told me how for some girls it really does pass. and as handsome as i am – was – you just needed a real man. and that perhaps i would find that someone.

i was unfairly surprised to see her words in my inbox. but that she preferred me to what's-his-name? that was brilliant.

i mean, i don't know if she did, but that's how i took it.

by some bizarre metric, i had won.

your mother liked me.

 

‘um, hello?'

it had been years but i recognised your voice. i just couldn't. you know.

‘who is this?'

 

you just cried.

you must have been using a landline. one with a cradle because i could hear the tears.

there were only a few, and they rustled like paper as they landed on the transmitter.

but i could hear them.

 

cancer.

i feel like it's always cancer.

when the doctors finally found it, she was too old to risk anything extreme.

your mother was dying and she wanted me over for dinner.

 

like countless others i tried to comfort you long-distance.

tried to assure you that modern medicine was a wonderful thing and that at the very least it would be painless.

it was not the right thing to say.

sorry.

 

i left in the morning.

stopping only twice to refuel.

and once for the underpants.

 

but still i was too late.

she had opted for death in her bed.

but only after she had set the table. wine glasses and all.

 

and you were all in your seats when i arrived.

the table littered with hand-written notes and around it struggling faces.

‘yours'.

mine.

 

i opened the envelope you'd handed me.

 

and days later as i watched your husband lower her coffin, alongside the other real men in your real family