As we roamed and foraged, I began to look for booze cabinets. Not that I was digging into them or anything, but I noticed myself noticing myself paying attention to stock levels. I began to fantasise about good red wine, about that first sip, something deep and woody, something with the power to slip me up a notch, to refocus my view. My abstract passion for red evolved from observation to actually extracting bottles from the cabinets or shelves, examining them for potential, turning them over in my hands and feeling the weight. Then I would put them back, carefully.
Eventually I found myself in a Bianca’s bedroom in Summerstrand, on the beachfront. Her room looked out on Marine Drive, over a few scrub-covered dune humps and then onto the sea. Thin raindrops were tearing into the shoreline at forty-five degrees, the southwester driving perfect, glassy waves which peaked and rolled and peaked and rolled, an occasional dolphin the only surfer taking advantage.
Having stashed her mobile, I flipped through Bianca’s photo albums, which were meticulously ordered and maintained, and which stretched right from early childhood through to the end. In pink sleep shorts and a vest, arms around mother in the backyard. Father teaching her to sail a yacht on the Sundays River. Sixteenth birthday with friends at the Pizza Hut. Hair short and styled for the occasion, light make-up, all smiles, friends and lipgloss.
I went for her father’s 2019 Zonneblom Shiraz.
I returned with a corkscrew and the bottle and lay down on Bianca’s unmade bed.
And it was beautiful, while it lasted. The warmth of the wine, the blurring, evocative safety of her photos. She was ordinary, Bianca. Dark hair. Careful smile. Eyes that sparkled and evaded in equal measures. Bianca with her sailboat. Bianca and dad chasing older brother in fancy-dress masks. Bianca baking, silly hat on head, floury hands in the air.
The wine poured through me and healed me, touching gently, reaching into all the corners. My head went warm, then cold, then warm again. As the bottle died the red crust grew on my lips. I ground it off with the heel of my palm, examining it like it had some deeper, metaphorical meaning. Which it did.
I drained the bottle and passed out, Bianca on her bike in my lap.
I woke in the dark, throbbing drunk, the wind and rain pulsing outside.
Back to dad’s rack, another Zonneblom, back again, stumbling. Suddenly I was reaching for destruction or damnation or something similar and opening the third was impossible. I couldn’t get the screw into the cork.
And then out the front door and to the car and over a rock and smashing my face into the ground and the black wet darkness of being out cold in the rain on some stranger’s driveway. Then the waking and the pain needles all through my face and my torn lip and my ripped cheek and the sight, the awful, pathetic sight of my shard of tooth on the driveway, pointing like a compass in the direction of home.
I laughed when I saw Babalwa the next day but she didn’t return it. Her face fell, her eyes hooded and careful and a little bit scared.
‘What the fuck?’ She shouted like a mother. ‘What the bloody fuck Roy?’
‘I got lost.’
‘Your face.’ She shook her head and then snuck another look at me. ‘Your lips. Jesus, Roy, your tooth!’
‘I won’t do it again, promise.’
‘What?’
‘Drink.’
‘That’s what this is? You went drinking?’
She closed the space between us down to a millimetre and slapped me, through the cuts and scabs, through the broken lip and tortured gums. As the pain shot through my mouth I groaned and fell back a step or two. ‘You stupid fuck,’ she said, crying now, tears running down both cheeks. ‘Please, please, I’m begging you, Roy. You’re all I’ve got. You’re the only hope there is. If you turn into this…’ Her head twisted away from the horror. ‘If you turn into this, you’re pushing me out, totally alone, into the world. You can’t do that. Jesus Christ, you can’t do that, Roy.’
‘I said I won’t.’
‘I don’t believe you.’ Babalwa walked away.
I saw her again two days later.
By then my mouth had started the healing journey, healthy parts reaching for each other over the volcanoes. The remaining half of my tooth throbbed constantly. Babalwa insisted I extract it, but I refused. The pain would fade, or the nerve would numb, or something like that. She shook her head and walked away again.
The pain did numb, eventually, ratcheting down from a scream to a throb, from a throb to a pulse, from a pulse to an annoying dull ache. I sliced constantly on the guillotine that now hung from my gum, tiny, almost invisible trickles of blood forming repeatedly in the curl of my tongue.
It was weeks before Babalwa could look at me directly without her own countenance crumpling completely.
I stopped smiling.
I eliminated the smile from my life.
The very idea of smiling, gone.
Losing a back tooth is unfortunate. Losing a front tooth is life-changing. I would catch glimpses of myself in shop windows and stray mirrors and every time I was shocked; the combination of hair and tooth had created a reflection I didn’t recognise. I turned the van’s rear-view mirror far left, cutting myself out entirely. I withdrew from Babalwa, and from myself. I lay awake at night, fizzing in sobriety, frogmarching myself into dreams of magnitude. I whipped and whipped and whipped. But while the scars slowly grew closed, the damage remained.
‘Boss.’ Fats sipped his tea and blinked rapidly. ‘That’s about the most fucking tragic thing I’ve ever heard.’ He wiped back a tear. ‘Serious. Since all this shit happened, this is the most pathetic, disturbing thing…’
I shrugged, picked a tea mug off its stand, reached to turn on the kettle and then put the mug back. ‘Imagine how I feel.’
‘That’s the point, nè?’ Fats locked me in for a while, eyeball to eyeball. ‘That’s exactly the fucking point.’
‘What’s the point?’ Babalwa slurred, having appeared at the corner of the kitchen door. She was wiping her eyes.
‘Hai.’ Fats shook his head. ‘We were just discussing your mlungu here and his dental problems.’
‘You drinking tea?’ Babalwa asked Fats hopefully.
‘Ice-cold. Straight out the barrel. You want?’
‘No. Yuk’. She shivered in the doorway, hugging her elbows.
‘Where you from, anyway?’ Fats asked, managing to sound simultaneously serious and slyly suggestive of something unnamed.
‘Port Elizabeth. PE.’
‘Ah. Land of the defeated. Askies.’
‘Not so bad.’ Babalwa glared at him. ‘It wasn’t so bad.’
Fats carried on the conversation in a mix of bad isiXhosa and tsotsitaal. Babalwa replied rapidly and within seconds I was gazing around the room looking for something. I tried to hang onto the one or two familiar words, but it was useless. The conversation shifted gear several times and I felt myself become the subject, discussed rapid fire, followed by an awkward silence.
‘Sorry, Roy, my man, you know, it’s good to connect. Authentically.’ Fats drained the last of his tea and thumped the mug down into the sink without looking at me.
Babalwa backed out of the kitchen, still hugging herself.
Fats turned and beamed at me blankly. ‘Well, I must tell you, it’s fucking good to have some more faces on board. And one that I already know – I would never have thought it was possible.’
‘How long you been following us?’ I asked on a whim.