HERMANUS MARKET.
The scent of Hunter’s rooibos tea reminds me of my mother reading to me in Amsterdam (Of Mice and Men, The Old Man and the Sea) and how she never folded down the corners but marked how far she’d read with a guineafowl feather instead. And how I begged her to tell me of South Africa and she’d tell me that if you filtered it all down you ended up with a blue sea and flower sellers in Adderley Street and snoek fishermen in Hout Bay and Zulu rickshaw men in Durban ... and a hole dug by diamond hunters. All things spinning around a deep, deep plughole.
And always, rooibos tea and frangipani and the giddy smell of the sea.
And though the words and images eluded her, the murmuring cadences of my mother’s voice sent my sister drifting into tulip-vivid dreams.
I am joggled out of reverie by her heading this way, by the swishing whisper of flouncy fabric against her skin, and by the telltale outline of a tanga.
Buyu follows her like a dog. For a moment I fear he’ll sniff at her ass. I wonder how he senses this is her, my seagull girl.
– Hey. I heard you play your guitar the other day, in front of the Burgundy. And I was wondering ...
A fermata: an unbearably sustained note.
– ... if you’d play for me this Friday.
My heart goes haywire like a rat in a box.
Buyu nods frenziedly and hops from foot to foot behind her tangaed ass.
Words find it tricky to travel through my dry gullet:
– For ... you? Just for you ... alone?
She laughs that killing, pearly laugh again.
– I’m having a party. A few folk are coming out from Cape Town.
My heart flick-flacks. She’s inviting me to her party!
– I thought it’d be cool to have live music.
Fool. She’s not inviting me to hang out with her. She just wants me to amuse her friends. This casts me in another undefined limbo: I’ll be neither guest nor servant. In a word, the problem of being coloured in South Africa under apartheid.
– How much do you charge?
Buyu’s flicking his fingers to signal mucho mucho money.
– I play at Quayside for tips.
– He charges five hundred a throw. He’s good, Hunter pipes up.
– Five hundred?
I glare at Hunter.
– We can haggle ... if you want, I tell Lotte.
Zero’s Survival Tip #2. Moffied down.
– He’d sell his mother for a pittance, Hunter flippantly footnotes.
Lotte squints her eyes. Amused? Bemused? Hard to tell.
– What kind of music do you play?
– All kinds, punts Buyu.
– I play folk rock. Indie, I’d say. I love The Black Keys. And I can do reggae.
– Can you play any Wilco?
– Just ‘Kamera’, from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
– Hey. You’re tuned in.
– Tuned into what? Hunter quips in her wisecrack way.
– To find my place you just follow the path from the harbour towards Kwaaiwater. Come along after the market shuts down. You’ll see fairy lights hanging in the yard. And a flowering frangipani.
I act witless to hide the fact that I have voyeured into her frangipani yard from the cover of milkwoods.
– Cool.
– Hey, I don’t know your name.
– Jerusalem.
She arcs a brow.
– Jerusalem?
– You may call me Jero, if you’d rather. My old man does.
– No. Jerusalem’s magic. There’s music in it.
I feel as if a blade fan is spinning in my head. Or a seabird flapping his wings. Whhhoooff. Whhhoooff. Whhhoooff.