Denise doesn’t come home.
33
A LIFE IN THE SKY
I feel as though I am standing on a ledge on the outside of a high-rise building. The Ponte Tower, perhaps. Enough people have fallen to their death from its soulless windows to make it some kind of macabre landmark. So I am on the fortieth floor and the rubber at the bottom of my leather slip-on brogues is the only contact I have with the earth. My body sways in uneasy arcs and I feel the wind lifting my hair. Below the cars and people are in a hot swarm as if today is their last. Above is all oxygen-blue sky and near silence. It is understandable that a man in this position would take the easy way out and opt for a life in the sky instead of down there. But first the man has to be brave enough to be devoured by the earth. Brave enough to bend his knees and lift his soles in a childish hop, or merely step off, stiff-legged, into oblivion. I feel the pull. I feel the earth calling in its husky sotto voce. But I am not a brave man.
It’s a kind of psychological vertigo. I feel myself being drawn in by the darkness: age, defeat, despair, the black hole that is my life, the inescapable feeling of loss that I have carried around in my pocket since I was eight. But there is something else too, some power that is holding me back, doesn’t let me stumble, doesn’t let me jump. An invisible harness. If I believed in God I would be tempted to say that it is His mischief.
I decide I won’t jump.
Not today.
34
NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES
When Denise doesn’t show up in her own family portrait (or for breakfast the next day), I give in to the hungry paranoia and look through her handbag. She has the usual feminine trinkets: a half-empty pack of tissues, a rattling tin of mints, cinnamonwax lipstick and a spare, slightly scuffed tampon. I also find her wallet, a sleek rectangular mockadile rectangle with a large silver clasp but, in it, only cash. The paranoia coldpaws the skin on the back of my neck. I rationalise: not everyone has a credit card. Not everyone has a driving license. Not everyone carries their ID around like it’s 1984. And anyway she must have a second wallet, a second handbag which she has with her now or how would she get around? I wonder fleetingly if she has left me and so check the drawers for her clothes, which all seem to be there, tousled and softsable. As I am fingering her things I feel something hard and cold. Small metal symbols on a circle. I extract them and see that they are three keys attached to a silver apple key ring. Eve’s house keys.
The doorbell rings and without looking I know it’s the cops. They have come to handcuff me and push my head down into their shrieking blue and white car. I grab the tote bag out of my cupboard. It is pre-packed with a few changes of clothes, essential toiletries, condoms (force of habit) and my Moleskine. I packed it days ago when I began to suspect that my life was about to take an unusual turn. It reminds me of the bag my mother kept in the latter months of her pregnancy with Emily. She would sit with it on her bed and unpack it once a week, shaking out the clothes and receiving blanket and smoothing them down, only to refold and pack them again. Dad used to shake his head and make vague cuckoo gestures. She’s at it again, he would say with an elbow in my ribs. I wondered if that meant she did it for me, too.
I reach under the bed for my emergency wad of cash. The envelope isn’t as thick as I remember it but it’s all I have, so I toss it in before zipping up. I can’t take my car because A) it no longer belongs to me, and B) the cops will be camped outside the front of the house where the garage is. The doorbell goes again. I consider leaving a note for Denise but I have no idea what to say. I take the keys instead.
The boundary walls in Johannesburg are notoriously high and usually barbed or electrified but there is a chink in my neighbour’s barricade I think I can slip through. I sling the tote over my back like a backpack and launch myself up into a tree. If I can climb along the branch we share, I should be able to make it over the deadly palisade fence without losing my manhood. Crouching there, holding on with hot fingers, I wonder what the hell I am doing. I should definitely climb back down and hand myself over. Be responsible. Be an adult. Face whatever consequences there may be. Instead I scuttle and jump and land on happy groundcover. When I stand up, I’m in the neighbour’s garden and I hear a growl.
The dog isn’t that scary. I mean, it’s not one of those Dobermans like Higgins has in Magnum P.I., the ones that look like the Devil’s dogs. And I am sure this particular dog’s growl can be interpreted as ‘Oi, have we met?’ rather than ‘I’m going to tear you limb from limb’, but one can never be sure. He looks like a giant whippet. I don’t know what they are called, perhaps a greyhound? I hope he doesn’t recognise my voice from all the times I’ve yelled at him to shut up. I don’t know much about dogs but I know that greyhounds are fast, so I need to outsmart him because there is no way I will be able to outrun him. I look him in the eyes and try to act firm but friendly. I take a few slow steps in the direction of the west wall. He barks, once, twice, like Lassie reporting a girl child fallen down a forgotten well.
“Gravy,” comes a sweet female voice from heaven, and then a beckoning whistle. “Gray-vee, c’mere boy.” Another friendly whistle. Gravy doesn’t take his eyes off me but rears back and lifts his snout in the air and barks again. I take a few more steps away. I motion wildly for him to go toward the voice. He is not fooled – until there is clanging of metal food bowls – then he is gone in a wag of a tail.
I am able to climb over the west wall too, thanks to a giant compost cube; from there I jump down onto the grassy pavement where I am free and clear. As soon as my feet touch land I run in the opposite direction to my house and the visitors. My heart is pumping, my muscles are singing and I feel good. Thank God I have been running in the last few days. It takes five minutes to get to a main road where I point upwards with my right index finger to signal a taxi to take me into town. A red kombi in particularly bad nick comes barrelling past but then slams on the brakes so hard the cars behind him have to squeal to stop. I hop in and the passengers shuffle aside to make space for me.
I am heavy-breathed and sweaty but the taxi is overcrowded, so I guess there is no chance of a window seat. There is kwaito on the sound system which more or less blankets the noise of the angry hooting outside and once I pay and sit back, the rest of the passengers seem to get over the novelty of having a white man in the car and start talking again. We lurch forward, nudge our way back into the lane in small jumps and we’re off. Various parts of the interior are stuck together with Prestik and masking tape. The rear-view mirror is barely hanging onto the ceiling of the car, weighed down by purple fuzzy dice, a hula girl and some prayer beads. The driver eyes me, suspicious, and I look away.
When we reach town I have to ask a few people how to catch the next ride: I don’t know the hand signal or where I should go. Someone outside the Chicken Licken on Bree Street directs me to a huge taxi rank I never knew existed and find my way pretty easily from there. Strangers smile. They must think I am a lost (or brave) tourist and they flash their gums at me. I wonder how they would react if I was driving my air-conditioned Jag XKR around here, instead of sweating through my shirt, trying to find the way out. To reach the rank I pass market stalls which deserve to feature in Visi magazine: beautifully arranged bowls of colour with green Granny Smiths, vibrant naartjies and bruised guavas. A few meters on, the panorama of food becomes nightmarish: tables of sheeps’ heads, some skinned with bursting eyeballs, others still in their wool, matted with blood. There are men without their shirts on, bloodslick on blackskin, with pangas in their raised hands. There are women squatting on beer crates, hunched over and stirring aluminium pots over small fires. Skaapkop. Sheep’s head. I smell the guavas and the milky-eyed skop. Flies buzz in the hot air.