‘Anyway, in the dream I was sitting in a wooden chair. I remember the chair especially well, ’cause it felt out of context. Wrong. Then this face appears. Oprah. Not old Oprah. Young Oprah. Her voice was really warm. Gentle. Like it actually took hold of me a bit, like in my stomach – it gripped me. Anyway, ah fuck, I should just say it. She told me it was up to me now. That the key was love, not hate. That there are reasons for everything. Even the smallest things. Like a bird sitting in the tree. He’s there for a reason. She told me that, and not to panic. That I need to think of the family and grow it. Shit, it sounds stupid now, but it was so real, so vivid. When I woke up in the morning, I took ages to get out of bed, just remembering it. The texture of it. Her words. How warm she was.’
‘And when you got up?’
‘Gone. Everything. Everybody.’
‘People, and pets,’ I said. ‘And livestock. I’ve seen a few dogs around, a couple free pigs, a wild cow, but other than that, nothing. Farms are empty. And it must have been at night, ’cause everything is locked up at night. Like the car park at the beach.’
‘I know.’ Babalwa looked up at Jesus, back at me, then Jesus again. ‘The dream, Roy, it was too much. Too real. It must have been something else. It must have been…’
I left the church.
Jesus was freaking me out.
I strolled back over to the pyramid and lighthouse; odd, incongruous structures. The pyramid especially, with a neat bench attached to the front of its skirt, welcoming sea-view visitors. I found a plaque on the reverse side, which read:
To the memory of one of the most perfect of human beings who has given her name to the Town below.
I sat on Elizabeth’s bench and stared out, over the skatepark and educational graffiti walls, at the sea.
CHAPTER 15
Just look at this grass
I tried to woo her.
In writing it sounds different – teenage and constructed. But at the time it was real, the attempt wrapped around the weird fact of the two of us. Around the days we spent together, or near each other, circling from a middle distance. So call it love. Call it what you will, at the time and in those moments there was a pull towards her.
Why would I resist?
And what is to ‘woo’, anyway? It, the word, has all the hallmarks of a plan, a trap. But really it was the typical flutterings of a human heart. I saw her see me, and in the process I began to see myself, feel myself, become aware again of my feet on the ground; my grey, flying hair.
Or, put another way, my chest began to swell. So I pushed it forward. One does these things. One doesn’t always know why.
Often, one turns to jazz.
I had this idea. A vision, really. A dream.
Babalwa’s in the kitchen, stirring something light and non-taxing. She’s wearing a summer dress. It’s blue and a little bit yellow and every now and again it puffs out with the wind and you know there’s another form in there, a presence, waiting. Me, also in the kitchen, chopping and guiding, the master planner. Bill Evans or Moses Molelekwa is playing and there is wine in our glasses – metaphorically in my case (I’m sipping Appletiser maybe; regardless, the bubbles dance like champagne). The sun is thinking of setting, there’s that rich orange lightness in the air. She’s a little tipsy, but only a little (OK, maybe I’ve smoked the tiniest bit of something, just for mood’s sake). The air is rich with the smell of onions frying. It’s that smell as they hit the pan, the fizz and that first rush of it, then of the garlic and the simmer. The piano carries us and she looks over, just a functional glance really, maybe she’s checking where the pepper is, and she catches a sideways slip of me and she smiles, instinctively.
And pause.
The generator – an old red thing requiring bicep force and much gas – delivered power, but proved surprisingly hopeless at charging the battery for longer than ten minutes.
The jazz, therefore, was tricky.
I initiated searches for inverters and other, better batteries, but we had, between us, a fool’s understanding of what we were doing, and why we were doing it. And the hard fact is that jazz doesn’t matter that much.
Still, there was a piano tinkling in my heart that evening. And the sun was actually right, just on the golden side of going down. She was in the kitchen, stirring something. I was alongside, chopping, and it felt, for a few moments, like it.
A little later, my heart still quietly whistling, she screamed from the back porch. ‘The water! Roy, the water!’
I dropped my wooden spoon into the garlic and onions and bolted, to find her, jaw chattering, eyes hysterical, pointing at the water tank, the receptacle for her strange and amateurish – yet effective – network of roof rainwater pipes. She was pointing at a crack, seeping and leaking, stretching before our eyes.
‘What do we do?’ She turned to me.
‘Pray.’
In the minute of our watching the crack raced across the plastic tank, which then exploded over us.
I took her hand as we stood there helpless, drenched.
She took it back.
Inside, the onions and the garlic had turned to a heap of hot black mush, billowing fire and smoke. Babalwa grabbed the pan, ran out front and threw it all, everything, down the hill. It skipped a few yards and landed in a pile outside my front door. She turned and marched past my helpless presence, muttering something about useless and men.
As the sun set we sat in candle darkness, each with our own can of beans, each with our own thoughts and ideas about time and space and water and onions and garlic. She apologised, of course. It was no one’s fault, nothing to do with me per se, just frustration, and I accepted, of course, but we both knew that real men don’t say pray.
We scooped the beans, the hopeless beans, and said goodnight.
Later that night Babalwa vomited on my front door. She knocked and vomited and ran back. I followed slowly, grudgingly, then held her hand and her head while she spewed those bad beans back into a bucket, and then another, and then another. All of which I intended to wash, but eventually just kicked down the hill to join our other failures.
‘Roy,’ she called weakly from the shithouse, where her other end balanced over another bucket. ‘We need a plan.’
We settled after that. Each in our semi-detached flat, we coexisted gently for days, then weeks, then months. Water. Power. Food. Water. Power. Food. It was, ultimately, a simple equation.
Babalwa’s rain-catchment system was restored, rickety and yet ultimately effective. Trouble was, it didn’t rain too much, so every second morning I would drive around the suburbs and fill two twenty-litre barrels from the swimming pools.
I didn’t talk too much about the dream or her telling of it, and neither did she. We talked, instead, about our old lives. And then, the mirror image, our new life. The plan.
The grass on the reserve grew thicker, inching skywards in a knotted mat. I suggested trying to cut it, but Babalwa scoffed. ‘What,’ she asked snidely, ‘you’re gonna mow this hundred-square-metre lawn every week? Why?’
She was compelled by Joburg, by the VR clubs and naps, by the music scene and the graf rebels. In her mind they were all rolled up into a single metropolis where big things happened. She would pick at me with questions, one after the next, the links between each query leading me on to greater descriptive heights. I tried explaining that I had never even seen a graf rebel and that their lives were hard as stones – they were arrested and beaten, their nails were pulled, their balls shocked.