white-eye

From the lowest terrace, a path led down through the quagga enclosures. Despite the highway below and the memorial above, it was possible to feel, here, that one was out on the mountain, walking through pleasant green meadows. Con felt the relief of solitude.

This was short-lived. Soon enough he saw, on the path below, a ragged group of individuals heading down. He recognised them as the odd bunch from the memorial. They were moving slowly, but Con hung back, not wanting to interact. His session with Amina had left him feeling talked-out and tired. It suited him to dawdle, anyway: he had no wish to go home to Elyse just yet.

He let his gaze wander to the side, into the trees. And there – was it? – yes, something there, hidden and overgrown: the suggestion of white walls.

He waded through the thigh-high bush and found a small rectangular kraal of whitewashed bricks. He edged round to the threshold, and once inside he had no choice but to step from slab to slab, as the weeds were grown thick between the graves. Dutch inscriptions, some too worn to read; and many small unnamed infant headstones. He found Elyse’s surname on a stone set for a couple: Johanna Maria and Hermanus Jacobus.

He smiled; it was true: Elyse was rooted here. The golden chain of family was real. Not his chain, though. He wasn’t linked. Con picked his way back to the path and slowly on down.

Just before the road, the party below him paused and consulted and then split up. One figure carried on towards the bridge going over the highway, while the remaining three headed towards the university. The solitary figure was one of the ones wearing flowing clothes – some kind of poncho maybe. When she started over the highway bridge, he followed: he might wander down to Main Road and catch a taxi.

But the girl stopped in the middle of the bridge’s span, above the road divider. Below, the sparse cars heading into town sheared past the clogged rush-hour traffic going in the other direction. She put her hands on the railing and for a dislocated moment he thought she was going to jump: there was drama in the pose. But no. It seemed she was simply waiting for him.

Con reached the bottom of the slope, crossed the verge and climbed the steps to the bridge – committed now, no way to change direction. She turned to look at him. As he had half-known, it was the girl from the lion den, the girl who’d cried. Inevitable. The vanes of the old Dutch mill on the other side of the road rotated gently, and he felt he was being brought to the apex of the bridge by some relentless mechanism.

As he came towards her, he saw that she was holding something cupped in her palms – a bird? – as if about to release it into the air. Not a good place for such a gesture: the winds were busy up here. He hung back, waiting for the delicate moment to be past. But the girl looked up at him instead, and immediately tucked whatever it was she was holding – and he doubted now that it was a living creature – back into the folds of her garment.

Even in the luminous early-evening light, lit from all angles and floating in the sky, she seemed an unclear figure to him. The impression of someone dim, uncertainly outlined, tentatively and provisionally drawn, remained. Sketchy, was the word that came to mind. Her hair was blowing across her face and her hands were busy dragging at the strands, as ineffectually as they’d pressed at glass or crumpled tissue paper. Her clothes were made of some flyaway stuff that concealed her shape, and of an indefinable shade: the colour of dust and moths and mice. He’d instantly forgotten her face the last time, and he knew he would instantly forget it again. The setting, so dramatic, seemed to call for some more forceful character to play it – someone like Elyse, whose clean features and striking eyes would be used to great effect here on the windblown bridge, with the traffic below and the city laid out behind. This insubstantial girl seemed in danger of blowing off the edge of the bridge and away with barely a whisper of complaint. Con wanted to reach out and comb back her hair, neaten her up somehow.

The traffic was loud below them, and she seemed content to stand in silence with him for a while; and he was quite happy, too, to be suspended there without words.

“Hello,” she said, and for half a moment he felt disappointed: this ordinary piece of speech.

“Hi. I met you in the Lion House.”

“Yes, thanks for the tissue.” She laughed. Her teeth were small and uneven. She held out a little hand, fingers and fingernails all small and uneven too. “My name’s Mossie.”

“Mossie?”

“You know, like the bird. And you’re the lion man.”

“Head of Large Mammal Management.” He said it with a smile, although she wouldn’t get the joke. “My name’s Con. So – how did you know Mark?”

She gave an ambiguous flex of the shoulders. For a moment he saw the shape of her real body under her capacious garment, the swell of a breast. “Where are you headed?” she asked. “Do you want a lift? I’m going to town.”

Her car was parked just on the other side of the bridge’s span: a tiny little Fiat, much abused. It sagged on its toy wheels at the weight of two bodies. She piloted it down to Main Road, and then around and back onto the highway, past the mill with the whale bones embedded in the grass around it like bollards. She was silent, seemingly lost in thought as she drove.

He was surprised by the intensity of the traffic. Not driving, he’d become dislocated from the everyday rhythms of work, of waking and commuting, the tides of the city. He watched the people in their cars – now edging ahead, now dropping back according to the mysterious physics of rush hour.

He too spoke only a little, just “left here” and “right here” once they got to the city, as was needed. When they came up below the apartment in Sea Point, she sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel, letting the engine idle. The silence continued between them. It was peaceful. Soon he would have to go up and deal with Elyse again, her questions, her vivid and provoking self.

He could see that she was home: the lights were on, and the lit windows seemed to sparkle with all the complexities and puzzlements of human life. Shadows moved up there: the silhouettes of animal-headed beings, gods with extended necks or several arms, swaying to silent rhythms.

Shit. He’d forgotten: the rehearsal. He’d hoped to skip it entirely.

The space inside the little car felt much simpler, free of difficult meaning. They could, right now, drive far away from here, out to some country road. He and the strange girl sat looking up at the lights like two jackals gazing on a campfire.

“We’re having a little thing for him, you know?” she said.

“A thing?”

“A whatsit – not a memorial,” – she gulped a laugh – “because he’s still alive, obviously. But like a … a show of support. You should come.”

“Sure, when is it? Nobody mentioned it to me.”

“It’s for his friends, just his friends. Not anybody else from the Lion House.” She looked at him sternly.

“Sure.”

She leant across him – that thrusting shoulder again, indicating a hidden body. A pale hand snaked out of the poncho and jerked open the glove compartment. She took out a piece of paper and scribbled on its back with a gnawed ballpoint. She wrote strenuously, the pen-grip whitening her knuckle, her whole torso moving slightly back and forth in sympathy with the words. The exertion kindled a warm, musty scent from her body. As she wrote, something swung loose from the neck of her garment. A pendant of fur, or feathers … a rabbit’s-foot charm? He looked more closely and saw what it was: the body of a bird, folded in on itself but the feathers still bright. A white-eye. The kind of finch that came to eat the flowers in the tree outside Elyse’s balcony. For a moment, he wondered if it came from Gerard’s collection.

Seeing the direction of his eye, the woman stopped writing and tucked the feathered secret inside the folds of her clothes again. She handed him the paper with a sideways look.

“Thank you.” He slipped it into a pocket. The seatbelt trapped him: “I can’t …” He groped at the catch.

“Here,” she said, leaning over to release it with a stab of the thumb. As she did so, she kissed him quickly on the mouth and pulled away. The seatbelt slithered up over his shoulder and freed him.

“Right,” Con said. His face felt a little affronted. It had been an odd kiss, close-mouthed, aggressive. He was, he realised, disappointed. “I’m late, I better run. My girlfriend …” He wrenched open the door and struggled out.

Her face was obscure, as if she had sunk under a shallow depth of silty water. He nodded goodbye; she gave a reproachful nod back and pulled away, her exhaust racketing into the evening.

He stood in the road for a little while, passing the key-bunch from hand to hand and looking up at the flat’s windows.

 

Con didn’t dislike Elyse’s crowd. Many of them were witty and generous people. Musa, Elyse’s co-director in the small theatre group, was particularly friendly towards him, often trying to draw him out. But somehow the theatrical world still put him on edge. He’d made the mistake of trying to explain this once to Elyse. She’d looked at him as if he were monstrous. “How can you not like theatre? It’s storytelling, it’s what people do. Don’t you get that?”

“Yeah,” he said, not wanting a fight. “It’s not the acting on stage that bothers me, so much. It’s just … sometimes it seems like they never stop.”

“Just because you struggle in social situations doesn’t mean other people have to tone it down,” Elyse had snapped. “Sometimes I think you have some kind of problem. With people. With communication.”

“I communicate fine.”

“I’m not talking about small talk. I know you can do that. Anyone can do that.”

“No, they can’t,” he’d said, faintly offended. He was good with small talk. It had taken a fair bit of work to learn how to do that, and he didn’t like the way she dismissed it.

Con let himself quietly into the flat, but instead of heading for the lounge, he cut through the kitchen to the balcony. Here he could sit and watch through the glass. He’d been there a while before any of them noticed him: he saw one or two people glance his way, and Musa smiled and raised a friendly hand. Elyse, too, was conscious of his presence, he could tell by the slight vibration in her profile even as she turned her face away. She was irritated; she’d want him to go in, say hi, be normal. But Con felt resistant. He just couldn’t bring himself to sit with these people and try to move his mouth and hands as they did. He’d done too much of that today already.

He marvelled at them, though. Just bodies, just flesh and blood, but look what shapes they could make! Even Elyse’s annoyance was wonderful to watch. Their throats moved up and down – such beautiful actorly projection, diction – although he could hear nothing through the glass. He might as well still be in the car, driving, commuters sliding past him in their separate lives.

They were all good-looking people, lithe, dressed casually in tracksuit pants and t-shirts for rehearsal. They were acting something out now, practising moves: bending, curving, rocking. Every now and then someone would pick up a prop, a mask, and slip it on for a few steps before laying it down again. Elyse wore a mask with a long beak. Con noted Musa’s hands on her hips; they seemed to fit snugly there.

Music came on. Something rhythmic and drum-heavy. Four people in the room got to their feet and started moving together in a line. All four wore masks, feathered things that covered the tops of their faces, transforming them into a line of birds, flapping and pirouetting. Their movements suggested the leaps and skitters and flutters of animal motion, but imagined by people who didn’t really know animals outside of storybooks, who’d never been close. The melody was damped by the glass and only the deep beat came through, shivering the doors slightly with each thump. Now they were singing, mouths opening and closing like fledglings’. Con turned his face away to laugh.

The balcony – the tiles on the floor, the pot plant, the ashtray holding a stubbed-out joint – filled him with nostalgic fondness. Already he felt that soon he’d be leaving all of this. For something to do, he lit one of Elyse’s cigarettes and smoked it evenly, trying but failing to resist the rhythm of the music. Hand rising to his mouth and falling on the drumbeat, smoke rippling from his mouth in lieu of melody.

The guests left early, before ten, and he supposed that was his fault too: his glowering presence on the balcony must have soured the vibe. Elyse vanished from his field of vision for a moment, and then suddenly the airlock was broken and the glass door slid open, letting out the sounds of the last people leaving, chatting. Her mask was perched on top of her head, but as she came out onto the balcony and sat opposite him, she pulled it back down over her face like a visor, eyeing him through a slit. He smiled, but had no way to tell if she was smiling back. Why was she always doing this, always putting materials between them? Masks, for god’s sake.

“What are you, a bird of paradise?”

“Some kind of stork, I think.” She observed him. “You’re smoking.”

“So it seems.”

“Me too.” She held out two fingers for a smoke.

“Only if you take that off. I don’t want you going up in flames.”

She sighed and pushed up the mask, reaching to take the cigarette from him and leaning in again to have it lit. She was flushed from the dance, and the mask had left light lines around her eyes and across her cheeks where the elastic had pulled it close.

“So what happens with the stork?”

“Oh, you know, it’s a stork and a crow. Different bowls for water. The stork can’t drink from the shallow bowl, the crow can’t drink from the deep one, etcetera. The moral is, to each their own. I think. So. Where were you?”

“Just work. I had a meeting with Amina.”

“Oh.” She tapped the end of the cigarette into the pot plant, and it seemed she was about to accuse him of something: betrayal, infidelity. And he would’ve felt justly accused, although he’d never cheated on her, as he had before on others.

But instead she said, “I thought you might have gone to the hospital.”

It took a moment for him to know what she meant. He’d not been thinking of Mark. Clearly the man had been on Elyse’s mind, winking and beckoning.

“He’s still in hospital, right?” she continued. “Your friend.”

“So I understand.”

“You understand? You haven’t actually gone to see him, have you?”

“I’ve taken his mother a few times. Hey, I’m not even family.”

“That’s fucking shocking, Con.” She stared at him. She’d had to take off one hostile mask in order to reveal this other, even colder one below. He tried to match her look with a blank one of his own, but he couldn’t manage it. He leant forward, touched her exposed stomach. Warm, as always, and damp with sweat. He felt it flinch away from his fingers.

Impatient with this, he slid his hands further up her torso and tried to kiss her. He felt like only nakedness would allow them to see each other now. But she was too fast for him. Somehow the mask was on again: the hard wire of the beak dug into his nose, his lips found feathers. He worked his fingers under the edge of the mask and tugged it away from her face – too roughly; then grappled with the rest of her armour, hurting his hands on all the catches and latches.

At last she softened, allowed her clothes to fall. But it felt to Con like there was no end to her layers; that for every skin peeled another lay beneath, and under that a hide of a different colour, spotted, striped. However deeply he plumbed her body, he would never again get down to that softest skin.

 

The next day it rained heavily, and Elyse offered him her car. He knew what she meant by this. If he had the car, he could visit the hospital.

After work, Elmien asked him for a lift to the train, and Isak came too. But when Elmien heaved herself out of the back seat at the station, Isak stayed put. “Ja, you can take me home,” he said.

Con was a little surprised – he’d assumed Isak lived far out, on the Flats probably – but tried not to show it. He was prepared to take him anywhere. But the older man pointed him along the highway to town, Con’s usual route. Soon he realised where they were going. Through town, to Kloof Nek, up to the houses on the side of Lion’s Head.

The old pointy-headed peak was still there, one eyebrow made from a crooked pine tree. The slope was looking bushy and green; there’d been no fires on the mountain for several summers, he’d read. The houses below – an extension of the old shack camp in the quarry – had been made respectable, with running water and electricity: no more open fires or paraffin stoves knocked over. From a distance, the fence-line was clearly demarcated. Above, it was bush; below, clustered roofs. The dwellings now ran the entire length of the fence, completely ringing Lion’s Head and the old mosque on its shoulders and enveloping Signal Hill.

Con slowed the car as they came up to the Nek.

“It’s okay,” said Isak. “It’s not dangerous. The people all know me here.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just, I haven’t been up close for years. It looks different.”

It was very different. What had been a collection of shacks back when he was growing up, a place to score dope or after-hours booze if you were a reckless suburban teen, had transformed into something like a small town. There was a row of tiny identical two-room government houses painted pale blue; behind that, a bigger double-storey block with laundry hanging out of the windows, and some free-standing houses. The place was built up. He could barely see the fence.

“You know Leeukop?” asked Isak.

“I came here …” He turned to Isak. “Were you here? When they were building the fence? And pulling down the houses?”

“I wasn’t in Cape Town then; I was up north in those days.”

“It was a long time ago.” Con felt oddly shy, now, to mention it. “There was a demonstration … People got hurt.”

Isak shrugged. “There’s no one living here from those days, when it was just shacks. They chased that lot away. These people here now – we all came when they put the proper houses up. I came when I got the zoo job, got my papers for the Department house. I don’t know what happened to the old people.”

The top of Lion’s Head poked up from the backs of the houses. People could still go up there, he’d heard; once a month, at full moon, there was a guided walk. But it wasn’t really popular these days. The sight of the Department houses below spoilt the atmosphere.

“I’m just up here,” said Isak, nodding them up a steep track. It started out tar, but by the time it dead-ended at the fence it was sand. Isak’s small house was on the left, built up right against the barrier. Thick bush, covered in tiny yellow flowers, poked through the bars as if slyly trying to grab things from the world of humans. An old tyre, a child’s push-cart, a piece of tarpaulin. Isak’s house seemed to turn away from the fence. The stoep was on the other side of the house, and the only window on the alleyway was covered with a net curtain that looked like it never moved.

“You ever see animals, on the other side?” Con asked. “Like those big ones they talk about? Are there really eland up here?”

Isak shook his head, laughed shortly. “Animals? I get enough of that kind of thing at work,” he said. He got out and leant against the passenger door. “Thanks, man,” he said. “Oh, here …” He tossed a jingling handful through the window. Con caught it, surprised by the spiky weight.

“Ow,” he said. “What’s this?”

“All yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“I chucked it in this morning. Resigned. Bloody lions.” And he hopped backwards away from the car, raising his hand in salute. “Watch out for the wildebeest on your way down!”

Con stared at the keys in his hand. Each seemed enormous, antique, and there were a ridiculous number of them: one for each of the many gates behind which Sekhmet was jailed. He wanted to protest, but Isak had already vanished into his house. Con carefully clipped his own house key onto the bunch and stashed it in the cubbyhole, as you would a loaded gun.

Doing a five-point turn out of the cul-de-sac, Con nosed the car up close to the narrow section of visible fence. There were things piled up against this side of the bars: old car doors, pieces of wood, a rusty washing machine, blocking out the view of the mountain. Leant up against the fence the way you’d barricade a door.