SEA POINT, CAPE TOWN. Dusk.
On the beachfront a band of wheezing, floppy-jowled old men in deckchairs blow a slow, slurred Dixie tune. A madman conducts with a frenetic chopstick. One lone vampire tooth juts randomly out of his jaw.
Zero, Canada Dry and Dove Bait go reservoir-dog-style over the road: their feet swing all loose and jazzy.
Jabulani lags a few beats behind, like the old men falling behind the pace tapped out by the vampire.
Then Phoenix follows after, his eyes panning for unforeseen flak.
Outside the door a beggar jingles coins in a tin. The coins sing: Where do carp dart? Where do carp dart?
Zero digs his hands into his pockets and drops a coin into the tin.
The beggar foretells a myriad virgins for Zero as if he’s on a jihad. Zero laughs. And flips him another coin.
In the dim hallway a whore pouts gaudy lips and flashes a secret snatch of skirt skin.
Dove Bait lapses into a charmed daze.
Zero pinches his ear.
– Focus, man. You’ll get us shot if your eyes detour.
The lift smells of piss and Jeyes Fluid. Zero holds the lift till Phoenix catches up. Phoenix draws an Uzi out of his kit bag. Compared to this stubby spitfire-demon of a gun, Zero’s Colt is just a popgun.
– No shooting to kill, Zero intones. We go in. We teach them a lesson. We let them feel pain but survive. If they die, they learn zilch.
Dove Bait nods in awe of Zero’s profound logic.
Canada Dry jokes:
– Yes, sir. May I wipe off the blackboard after class, sir?
– But this is radical. There has to be another way, Jabulani pleads.
– Teacherman, what they do is radical, tunes Zero. This is not just slitting a fish and flinging it into a pan while its heart’s still beating. This is not just cooping a dog in a birdcage or hacking the fin off a shark for soup. Monkeys are just a notch away from being human.
His thumb and finger, two inches from Jabulani’s nose, measure out that notch.
– But to shoot ...
– This is the way to deal with monkey-gobblers.
– Why not call the police?
Canada Dry and Dove Bait laugh and shake their heads as if this is a damn good joke.
– We have to take the law into our own hands. It’s a war out there and the police are as outfooted as the Americans in Nam.
– But it’s not your war. What has this to do with you? With your wife or your son?
– When they hurt an animal or a child, they hurt me. I feel it in my bones. So it is my war. You see?
He hands Jabulani a handgun.
– I’ve never had a gun in my hand. I’m against violence.
Jabulani does not confess to his bid to kill a dazed sheep with a stone.
– I have always told my students ...
– You and Gandhi. And they shot him. But Mandela gave his nod to violence when there was no other way. And unfortunately, there are men who understand just this one language.
The pinging of the lift ends the dialogue. Again Jabulani hangs a few yards behind.
Zero halts in front of door number 113 and signals like a Nam jarhead for Jabulani to catch up.
Beyond the door they hear men laughing and joking in a sing-songy foreign lingo.
Over the lintel a gecko eyes a moth’s frenzied orbiting of a light bulb.
Zero nods at Canada Dry and Canada Dry back-pedals a few steps. Zero and Dove Bait draw their pistols from their pockets. Phoenix levels his Uzi.
The gecko zips after the moth. Moth wings flicker from his gob.
Canada hurls himself at the door like a rugby forward bent on barging his way over the try line. The door cracks and Canada Dry falls into the next filmic shot.
– This jig is up, yells Zero.
He swings his Colt as if he’s a marine on camera.
Eyes gape, gobs call out to pagan gods, hands flutter haphazardly as bullets sing over the round table with that gory thing at the hub.
A monkey-gobbler draws a Black Star pistol and aims at Jabulani.
Jabulani puts up his hands.
Zero shoots that monkey-gobbler in the collarbone. The Black Star spins out of his hands and blood spits like gust-flung dandelion darts.
Canada Dry, still down on the floor, stalks after the fallen Black Star.
The shot monkey-gobbler sinks to his knees.
Canada Dry’s stoked with gun: Waha! Chinese pistol!
Another monkey-gobbler slides a tinted glass door ajar and hops onto the balcony wall.
There’s a hiatus as all characters freeze (Jabulani’s hands still up in the air). The soundtrack goes dead. There’s an unscripted camaraderie to their staring at that comical figure see-sawing on the wall.
Then he’s gone and they all flinch for the clichéd silver-screen yowl:
Yet the man falls soundlessly.
The most curious thing about this silence is that the scalped monkey (surrounded by half a dozen monkey-gobblers) is still thinking with the brain they were about to spoon out of his skull and he sends an unworldly whine into it.
And Jabulani’s hands fall and his spine folds as his mind fades to black.