The next morning, I awoke on the sleeper couch. Lenka and Ivan had left sometime during the night. The living-room window had been left open to release the hash smoke, and for a moment I couldn’t recall what month it was. I could hear the main road coming to life again, the taxis heading up to town with commuters and students, and, except for the dent the three of us had left on my single mattress, everything around me felt the same way it had the previous day.
FOURTH PART
We never hear from the ugly man again. I guess there isn’t much else to say about him. He’s just one of this city’s many ciphers, we decide, one of the strange things that happen in the alleyways of the Southern Peninsula. Ruan speculates that he’s a deposed president, and Cissie says he’s the advisor to one. In any case, the money is retracted from our account, laundered most likely, and he never comes back for the ARVs. We decide to call him Ambroise Paré, after the man he admires, and Cissie says we should make masks out of his face. To the three of us, our planned meeting with Ethelia takes on an inevitable air, although we don’t discuss it much. Cissie goes back to work; Ruan and I hang out.
Ethelia shows up at Cissie’s place around a week later, on a Sunday afternoon. She knocks three times and finds the three of us sitting on the floor, each somehow sober. Cissie closes the door behind her. When she sees me, I wave at her and Ethelia smiles back.
I’ve never seen her close up before. She’s dressed in a matching denim top and jeans. Cissie walks to the bedroom to get the package we retrieved for her from the safety deposit box. We had gone straight there — a private security company on Orange Street — after having left the house in Woodstock. We hadn’t really been surprised to discover that Ambroise had prepared the way for us. We only had to present them with the letter.
Ruan’s reading an old comic book, an effort to calm his nerves. He’s had this issue since he was twelve, he says, and he’s let me have a look at it a few times. Half its pages are falling out, and it’s about the Silver Surfer. The superhero wakes up on an alien planet, stranded without his surfboard, the source of his energy. Close to the end, he tries to sell his memories for a way out, but gets cheated by an agency that converts them to video.
I watch him from the couch. Ruan closes the comic book and places it carefully on the table. Cissie returns with the package and hands it to Ethelia, who receives it with both hands.
What is it?
Cissie turns to us. We don’t know, she says, but it’s yours.
Is it from my father?
Cissie doesn’t reply. Ruan and I don’t say anything, either. I realize I’ve never imagined Ethelia as having a voice.
My aunt told me my father was an important man, she says. Then she shakes the parcel. Can I open it?
It’s yours, Cissie says.
Ethelia opens the package and money spills out, scattering on Cissie’s floor. It’s several wads of two-hundred-rand notes, followed by an ID and a passport.
Ethelia bends over to pick up the money, and for a moment it’s as if she’s back with her concrete pieces again — arranging them into another secret empire. Ruan, Cissie and I lean down to help, and Ethelia laughs as she handles the money. She laughs at the images of herself in the passport and ID.
So who knew? Cissie says. You’re a Canadian.
I search the kitchen drawers and find rubber bands for the notes. Then I try to count the money, but it’s too much to guess at a glance. We pack it up in bundles.
Ethelia stands with the package flat against her chest. My aunt will be happy, she says, before going quiet. Then she looks up again. You’ve seen my father, haven’t you?
Yes.
I guess all three of us say this at once.
Then Ruan and Cissie look at me and I go on.
We saw him, I say, and he wanted us to give you this.
Ethelia nods. Did he say anything about coming to my aunt’s?
I shake my head.
Then Ethelia looks down and nods. She starts to turn.
Wait, Cissie says, hold on. I have an idea.
She leaves the room and returns with a piece of paper and a sharpened pencil. Taking Ethelia by the hand, she leads her to the coffee table, kicking away an empty water bottle we were using for huffing. Ruan and I lean closer.
We watch them. Cissie asks Ethelia to draw a picture of the planet. It’s the lesson she’s used in her daycare class, the one her students couldn’t get right. Ethelia takes the pencil and touches it against the foolscap.
Cissie says, imagine you’re away from your aunt, and imagine you’re away from West Ridge Heights. She places a hand on Ethelia’s shoulder. Imagine you’re away from your envelope, and away from the three of us, also.
Then, when Ethelia starts to sketch an oval shape inside the page’s margins, Cissie says: imagine you’re drawing a map into all of us.
In the morning, around seven, I email my landlord and tell him I want out of my twelve-month lease. I’ve come to accept that this has to be done. François replies that it’s fine, it won’t cause much hassle, he’ll start showing the place to people right away. I type back, great, and leave West Ridge with Ruan and Cissie still asleep.
Down at the parking-lot gate, I wait for a car taking someone to work or school, and trail after its brake lights. Then I take a taxi along Main Road to Obs.
There was another hospital strike, our driver says when we reach the first stop in Mowbray. The passengers are packed on the seats behind him: twenty-two of us crammed in a fog of mixed perfume. The driver describes the passing of his mother-in-law, whose lungs collapsed in a Golden Arrow bus the previous morning.
That’s life, the driver says, before rolling down his window.
From my seat I look out at the racing tar, at the undulating roofs of the brazen storefronts, and I remember how, in my fourth year of high school, my biology teacher took a flying class on the coast of Natal, and discovered a lesson for us in the air above Richards Bay. Her name was Mrs. Mathers, and when she returned to our class the following week, she told us how the Earth was gutted open with so many new graves for paupers, that when the clouds parted, they revealed a view from the sky that looked like a giant honeycomb. Then she watched everyone’s expression. Mrs. Mathers was a part-time student of our emotional development. My classmates and I were known as the Math One class, relied upon for acuity but not much else, and we were only eighteen in number. Our teacher told us each grave was meant to contain the bodies of twenty adults.
She said to us, that is HIV.
I get off at Anzio and walk down past Lower Main. I use a round black tag to get inside my building, walk up two flights of stairs and let myself into my flat. The place feels like a storage room. It’s dead still and airless. I open a window and drop myself on the bed.
Then I try to doze off and fail.
I peel my phone from my pocket and hold it in my palm. It’s open on the text messenger. I remember Bhut’ Vuyo’s first message to me.
Lindanathi, you’ve come of age, it said.
It’s been almost ten years. That’s how long Luthando’s been turning into powder inside the Earth. I rub my hand over my face and spend another minute looking at my cellphone. Then I close my eyes and try for sleep again, but nothing comes.
Later, when I try to use the toilet, I get the same feeling. Nothing makes its way out of me as I squat over the porcelain, and I feel time slowing down again. I lift the cistern lid and pull on the lever to flush. Then I walk back to the kitchen and drink a glass of water with ice. In the end, I manage to get two hours of sleep.