‘You’re being way too sensitive. You shouldn’t take it personally.’
‘It’s my work, Jonathan.’ I’m desperately aware of people in the restaurant looking. Naledi Nxumalo leans in to the rugby player with the exact gossipy gleam in her eyes that’s her trademark in Bright City.
‘And your work is very, very good, baby.’
‘I feel hung out in limbo. I want to sledgehammer my cameras. I want to set the film stock alight.’
‘Not a bad idea for a performance piece. Okay, I’m sorry. Don’t look like that. I’m sorry.’
‘I wish you would take me seriously.’
‘Kendra,’ he says, taking my hands across the table. ‘This is the best thing that could have happened to you, career-wise. You couldn’t have planned it.’
There is something in his voice, a wink, a pride that tips me off.
And I realise something that’s been simmering in the back of my brain since I first saw the newscasts.
‘The security footage had audio.’
Jonathan grins. ‘Don’t be so naïve, my darling, of course it did. We had it specially installed.’
I drop my fork with a clatter and shove the chair back from the table so that Naledi Nxumalo and the rugby captain and half a dozen others perk up with interest.
‘Don’t be so dramatic.’ Why is it that half of what he says to me always starts with ‘Don’t’?
‘Come on Kendra, there aren’t even any press here. It’s a wasted effort. Sit down, please.’ And despite my best intentions to defy him, I do.
‘You’re a rational animal, Kendra. You know what this means for you as an artist.’
In my head, I am fashioning scathing putdowns, like I wouldn’t expect someone who never graduated from photographing fashion shoots – even if it is for the likes of Vanity Fair – to be capable of comprehending artistic integrity, but somehow these don’t make it out of my mouth. Because I am afraid. That he’s right. That without him, I am a nonentity. Girl in limbo. Ghost girl.
Jonathan orders me another one, unasked for, which I know the waiter will have to run down to the corner café to get, and I realise this is the end of something. Maybe not limbo so much as the falling space, like the moment after you’ve thrown yourself backwards off the boat, your hand on your regulator to stop it jerking free, but before you hit the water. Poised between.
Tomorrow I will spend the day apartment hunting. I will find a place to stay, no matter how much of a hovel, that is mine. As in, nothing to do with Jonathan. In the evening, I will take the underway down to Replica. Maybe hook up with Damian and Vix. Make new friends. I still have Toby’s comp.
That e-vite suddenly feels like a passport to somewhere other than here. And maybe tomorrow, everything will be different.
Lerato
So here we are, three mismatched women holding a meaningless memorial to three people I don’t remember. It’s bad enough I have to endure my sisters – Zama looking positively plump and matronly in a white kaftan and Xhosastyled headscarf, her attempt to dress up nice for the ancestors; Sipho in jeans and an orange t-shirt, with a shaven head that makes her look like a chemo survivor – but the gale-force wind is something else. We have to lean into it to get to the edge of the cliff overlooking Cape Point, and the herbs Sipho throws into the air get whipped straight back at us. There is a small cluster of foreign tourists who have braved the baboons and the wind to get up here, and who are utterly charmed by the proceedings, cameras clicking.
The reason we’re doing it here, at the craggy tip of the peninsula, rather than somewhere less exposed to the southeaster (like Clifton corporate, say) is because Sipho says we have to throw our prayers out to the wind and sea to carry them to our loved ones. It would be touching, if it weren’t so Hallmark, if we hadn’t done it all before. As remembrance rituals go, it’s an empty gesture, Sipho chanting some Buddhist shit and tossing around more bits of crushed leaf, just adding to the flotsam already whirling in the wind.
‘If we were following tradition, we would kill a goat,’ says Zama sagely, as if she hasn’t offered some variation on this insight every year. This makes me lose my patience.
‘As if we would get a licence to kill a goat in public. As if our Buddhist vegan over here would stand for it. But okay, Zama, assuming we could get that all worked out, then we could all have a big party, just like tradition specifies, eat our goat, drink mqombothi which you would have brewed up as the eldest, and each of us would get a bit of bloody sinew and hide tied onto our wrists to dry out. Because nothing says thanks to your ancestors like a bracelet made of smelly goat’s flesh.’
Zama is pissed. ‘I think it sucks that you don’t have any respect for your culture.’
‘I think it sucks that you’re deluding yourself that you have some deep spiritual connection, like you didn’t just read it on Wikipedia. There’s a difference between tradition and culture, Zama. The only fucking culture we got was growing up in a corporate skills school.’
Fighting instantly reduces us to being nine and six all over again, with Sipho trying to play peacekeeper in the middle, spinning her hippie crap about the moment and how we’re ruining it.
‘Please guys. Look!’ Sipho pulls a bundle of red elastic bands from her pocket.
‘Stealing stationery from the monks again?’
‘Lerato!’ Zama snaps, scandalised, as if she doesn’t agree with my diagnosis that Sipho’s a nutjob.
‘No, look. It’s not goat. But it’s something.’
Zama’s eyes go all glassy. ‘This is really… Did you bring this along specially?’
‘No. It was what you were saying.’ She is so sweet, so much a naïf, you can’t really be mean to her. I wonder if she’d be tougher, smarter, if she wasn’t always trying to balance us out.
I snap the elastic onto Zama’s wrist, stretching it out, so that it’ll hurt on the rebound. ‘Uh, yeah, but isn’t this more Kabbalah than Buddhist? Now there’s a tradition.’
They both glare at me.
Family are the people who irritate you the most and the most effortlessly. If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t give a damn and it bugs me a lot that I let them get to me, Zama’s more-spiritual-than-you bullshit and Sipho’s little-girl-lost act. Not for the first time, I swear this is the last time. That I’m not coming out here again. I will stop returning phone calls and emails. I will cut conversations short. I will forget birthdays and not be able to make anniversaries. I will let this drift, like continents, slowly, imperceptibly. Or fuck it, just put one between us. My exit plan is my faux-goat red elastic, my backdoor embedded in the adboards, sending me secrets worth money to the right eye. If Stefan doesn’t come through, it’s all I have to hang onto.
We sit in awkward silence inside the restaurant, protected from the wind but not the uncrossable distances between us. The only part of family ‘tradition’ we get right is the getting drunk, so that when I get home, I pass out and miss everything.
Toby
The underway is so jammed I have to loop and thread between the press of commuters. No worries for a boy on the skinny, nipping the gaps. But I am worried (not much, but they’re only paying me the second instalment after mission accomplished) about the rest of Clan Stinger in my wake. Doyenne especially. That girl is built sumo. But a backwards glance reveals that she’s just ploughing that construction worker bulk through, the crowd sensibly parting for her, while Ibis (aka Julia from the barcade) slipstreams in her wake. I’ve lost view of Twitch, but I’m sure the little shit can take care of himself.
In realworld, Doyenne is a taxi driver in her mid-40s – maybe a tad decrepit for fun and games, but who am I to thwart her recreational? Cos that’s what it’s about, right? Re-creations of lives you could never live.