She had told him she had a suicide fantasy. 'I wanted Adam to come home at half past six and climb the stairs and find me dead. Then he would kneel down beside me and say, "You're the only one I ever loved." But being dead, of course, I would never see Adam plead with me; those dreams could never be reconciled.'
He shook his head. How the hell could he have missed that? That's what happened when you got up too early, an hour earlier than usual. He still wasn't quite with it today. And he had given her alcohol as well. Benny the great mentor who 'had forgotten more than others had to learn.'
He sought some excuse in the way she had said it, the story she went on to tell. It had distracted him, created a false impression of a woman who was somehow still under control. She had manipulated him. When he whispered 'Soetwater', and she held her glass out for more, a fee for her story.
He had fixated on her thirst; that was the real problem. He had poured her two tots and she had pushed the hair back from her face and said, 'I was such a terribly insecure little thing.' And then her history had led his thoughts away from suicide; it had fascinated him. He had heard only her words, the heavy irony, the self-mockery, as though the story was some kind of parody, as if it didn't really belong to her.
She was an only child. Her father worked for a bank and her mother was a housewife. Every four or five years the family relocated as her father was transferred or promoted - Parys, Potchefstoom, Port Elizabeth, and eventually Bellville, which had finally broken the P-sequence. She left half-formed friendships behind with every move, had to start over as an outsider at every school, knowing that it would only be temporary. More and more she began to live in her own world, mostly behind the closed door of her bedroom. She kept a painfully personal diary, she read and fantasised - and in her final years at high school she dreamed of becoming a singer, of packed halls and standing ovations, of magazine covers and intimate sundowners with other celebrities, and being courted by princes.
The source of this dream, and the only constant throughout her youth was her paternal grandmother. She spent every Christmas holiday with her in the summer heat of Kirkwood and the Sunday's River Valley. Ouma Hettie was a music teacher all her life, an energetic, disciplined woman with a beautiful garden, a spotless house and a baby grand in the sitting room. It was a house of scent and sound: marmalade and apricot jam simmering on the stove, rusks or leg of mutton in the oven, her grandma's voice singing or talking, and at night the sweet notes of the piano issuing from the open windows of the small blue house, across the wide verandas, the dense garden and the neighbouring orange orchards, to the rugged ridges of Addo and the changing hue of the horizon.
At first Alexa would sit beside her grandmother and just listen. Later she learned the words and melodies by heart and often sang along.
Duma Hettie loved Schubert and the Beethoven sonatas, but her true joy was the brothers Gershwin. Between songs she would nostalgically relate the stories of Ira and George. 'Rialto Ripples' and 'Swanee' were magically coaxed from the keys, 'Lady Be Good' and 'Oh, Kay!' were sung. She told Alexa how that song was inspired by George Gershwin's great love, the composer Kay Swift, but that hadn't prevented him from also having an affair with the beautiful actress Paulette Goddard.
On a sweltering evening in her fifteenth year, Ouma Hettie suddenly stopped playing and told Alexa, 'Stand there.' Meekly, she took her place beside the piano.
'Now sing!'
She did, in full voice for the first time. 'Of Thee I Sing', and the old lady closed her eyes, only a little smile betraying her rapture. As the last note faded in the sultry evening air, Hettie Brink looked at her granddaughter and, after a long silence, she said, 'My dear, you have perfect pitch, and you have an extraordinary voice. You are going to be a star.' She fetched Ella Fitzgerald's Gershwin Songbook from her stack of LPs.
That was how the dream began. And Ouma Hettie's offical tuition.
Her parents were not impressed. A career in singing was not what they had had in mind for their only child. They wanted her to train as a teacher, get a qualification, something practical 'to fall back on'. 'What kind of man wants to marry a singer?' Her mother's words echoed ironically.
In her Matric year there was conflict, long and bitter arguments in the sitting room of the bank manager's house in Bellville. With the verbal ammunition provided by her grandma, Alexa fell back to her last line of defence: 'It's my life. Mine' A week before her finals she went for an audition with the Dave Burmeister Band.
Stage fright nearly got the better of her that day. It was nothing new. She had already experienced it at eisteddfods and the occasional performance at a wedding or with obscure bands in small clubs. It became a sort of ritual, a demon that began systematically to attack her four days before an appearance, so that, with a wildly beating heart, perspiring palms and an overwhelming conviction that she was about to make a total fool of herself, she could only complete the trip from dressing room to microphone with a supreme effort of will.
But as soon as she began to sing, with the first note uttered from her constricted throat, the demon melted away as though it had never existed.
At her first performance with Burmeister in a Johannesburg club, her grandma had been there to hold her hand and give her courage. 'This is what you were born for, my dear. Go out there and knock them dead.'
And she had. The reviews in The Star were still beside Ouma Hettie's bed when she passed away quietly in her sleep two months later. 'Alexandra Brink, in shimmering black, is so easy on the eye - young, blonde and beautiful. But once she starts to sing, her smoky, sensual voice, complete mastery of classical material, and innovative interpretations indicate a rare maturity and an acute musical intelligence. Her range encompasses Gershwin, Nat King Cole, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Bobby Darin, with Dave Burmeister's arrangements fitting her style and personality perfectly.'
Oliver Sands of Phoenix, Arizona, told Inspector Vusi Ndabeni he had fallen in love with Rachel Anderson on Day Eight of the African Overland Adventure. In Zanzibar. Over a plate of seafood that he had been eating with great concentration.
'You are obviously enjoying that,' said Rachel.
He looked up. She stood on the opposite side of the restaurant table with the emerald-green sea as a backdrop, long, dark-brown hair in a plait over her shoulder, a baseball cap on her head and lovely long legs in shorts. Ollie was a bit self-conscious, embarrassed by the way he had been devouring his meal. But when she smiled and pulled out the chair opposite him with a 'May I join you? I'll have to try some too,' he could scarcely believe his luck.
He told Vusi they had had to introduce themselves to each other on the first night of the tour - in a ring of camp stools beneath the African stars. He hadn't even tried to remember Erin and Rachel's names. Pretty, athletic, educated girls like that never noticed him. When she sat at his table in Zanzibar and ate her own plate of seafood with gusto, he struggled to remember her name, with a sense of panic. Because she had talked to him. She asked him where he was from and what his future plans were. She listened to his answers with interest, told him of her dream to become a medical doctor, and that one day she would like to make a difference, here, in Africa.
And so he lost his heart to a nameless woman.