I close my eyes and wait for my blood to drum my pulse into my ears, a sound I’ve always found reassuring. Sometimes, I like to imagine I can hear my illness spinning inside my arteries, that it’s rinsing itself and thinning out.
I hear Mary’s voice again.
Lloyd, she says, I think that’s enough, don’t you? We’ve had our fill.
It doesn’t usually take her this long.
I want you to stop this, she says, and listen to me carefully, okay? What we’re here for is to lighten each other’s burdens, not to spread lies from crackpots. I hope you take Nandipha out of that hostel, too. You’re putting your wife at a very big risk with this nonsense.
Her cheeks draw in as she pushes herself up from her chair. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it’s easy to tell when she’s upset.
I mean, if money’s the problem here, she says, then why don’t you just come upstairs with me after the session? We can easily look up a treatment plan for Nandipha. Of course, she should be present, but time and time again you’ve refused to bring her to our meetings, haven’t you? You think it’s good that she hides her status from medical professionals.
Ta Lloyd starts to nod.
For Pete’s sake, Mary says, don’t just agree with me. You need to stop spreading this nonsense and putting your family in danger. There’s no cure for HIV, but as you can see for yourself, it’s a condition anyone can live with.
She turns around to confirm this with the rest of us, and we nod, doing our part like we’re meant to. When I look over, I find Ta Lloyd doing the same.
Yes, Mary, he says.
Right, that’s enough then, she says. You can sit back down now. She starts scanning the room for the next volunteer.
Please remember, the rest of you, she tells us, we’re here to help each other heal.
When no one volunteers, Mary starts flipping through the attendance roster, ticking off our names.
Let’s have one more speaker, shall we? Then we can break for coffee and biscuits.
Relieved, we do as we’re told. Ta Lloyd sits back down and I watch his face going slack from his forehead down to his jaw. When the fluorescents flicker twice over our circle, I look up. Then I wonder about all the other people mending their lives on the floors above us. I remember once seeing a woman there who had what I have, compounded with acute tuberculosis. Her salivary glands had blown out as wide as the cheeks of a Bubble Eye goldfish, and she was there to dispute the window-period of her illness, a complication which had rendered her results indeterminate. When the nurses ignored her complaints, she turned around and laughed at them with such exuberant bitterness, the rest of us couldn’t help but look up from our laps. Swiveling on her heel, the woman hurled her objections at the waiting room, next, condemning each of us for our silence.
This is what I think of now as we sit in our circle. Cissie places her hand on my knee again, and when she does it this time, the table holding our coffee begins to tremble.
I guess I don’t know where to lead us next. My uncle is a man set on changing the nature of everything I’ve known here, and I don’t know where to walk to that’s flung far enough from his reach. Maybe I should accept this and no longer go on fighting him.
Done with the session, Ruan, Cissie and I decide to go for a pizza. We take a taxi back to Claremont and walk into Café D’Capo on Main Road. They have this special there we can afford, and so we order two bottles of wine and polish them off over a large margherita.
Then we order another bottle.
During intervals, I look across the road to where I could buy airtime. Ruan says he knows a guy who lives in a flat in the same building as the café; that he can pat him down for a bankie, about three grams of cheese.
We take the lift up. The guy holding the bankie’s called Arnold. He comes out in silk boxers, with tousled hair, a boom of down-tempo beats pounding out of his living room. Ruan hands him three five-tigers for the weed, and calls him an overpriced but reliable asshole. They share a forced, stilted laugh, and then we take the lift back down.
We walk past Café D’Capo, waving guiltily at the waitress clearing our table. She looks twice our age, and has our soiled serviettes bunched in her hands. We cross the road and wait for a taxi at the corner of Cavendish Square, just across the road from the Nando’s. I decide against walking into the mall for airtime. I can get it later, I decide, maybe further along the way.
What? Ruan says to us, after a while.
We’ve been staring at him since we bought the weed from Arnold.
Dude, I know him from a guy at work, he says.
We grin. Cissie and I don’t say anything. We nod and look across the road.
Then Cissie says, what do you think of guys like that, anyway? He probably has parents who own half of Cape Town.
I shrug. Maybe I should send him my CV, I say.
Then our taxi arrives. The gaartjie leaps out, hefting stacks of coins in a canvas sack, a white Sanlam moneybag that’s gone brown around the bottom stitching. He points us towards the taxi and we pile in before the door slides shut on its own.
Inside the Hi-Ace, I take Ruan’s cellphone and SMS Yes in response to my uncle Vuyo’s message. Then, to sign it, I write Lindanathi and attach my number for him to reply to. I resist an urge to turn my phone off. If this is what he wants, then this is what he wants, I decide. I hand the phone back to Ruan.
The three of us spend the next hour putting up posters along the main road, from Claremont to Salt River, all of them telling people how to buy my ARVs from me. Then we carry glue in Tupperware containers from Cissie’s fridge, jump the Mowbray train to the city and take a bus out to the West Coast. I take a look at the time on my phone and it’s only mid-afternoon. I guess this is what they mean when they call Cape Town the city of slumber. Time seems to speed up here, and then it stalls, and then it seems to speed up again before it stalls.
We pass Paarden Eiland just as the sun begins to burn itself through the clouds. It throws down a harsh beam that bisects the bus and Cissie taps my shoulder and says I should turn around. She tells me to look at how we’re sitting on the right side of the light.
Then we pass Milnerton, the ocean sparkling and still, covered in white spots flecked across its vast surface. It looks as if all the salt has been sucked up to the lid of the Atlantic. After that Blouberg, the destination we’ve chosen for our excursion today, lists into our bus-driver’s wind-screen.
I open the notebook program on my cellphone. I have orders for Ronny, Lenard and Leonardo. I’ve got one for Millicent. I write down Ta Lloyd and add a question mark after his name. Then, after a moment, I also add Nandipha, his wife. This makes up the list of reactives we could still sell our pills to at Wynberg. Two previous clients, Gerald and Melanie, haven’t come to meetings for a year.
In Blouberg, we stalk into an internet café, this gamer-powered cavern complete with a coffee plunger and blue carpet tiles. The computers are sectioned into black cubicles with little hooks that hold up oversized headphones.
It’s one of those LAN gamer killing pens, I say to Cissie. The first-person-shooter covens that seem to grow in popularity each year.
Cissie nods, somewhat slackened by the place’s distractions. I fax my attendance slip to Sis’ Thobeka at the front counter. There’s a sign here that says they sell R29 airtime vouchers.
I catch Ruan looking around with this grim, beaten-up expression on his face.