LAST NIGHT I COULDN’T SLEEP. Outside my bedroom a man stood and looked in at me, trying to decide whether to bang his pink-palmed hands against the glass and splinter the wood to get in. When I turned over to look him full in the face (leering, goblin-eyed) he wasn’t there, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the idea of the men, always with me.
Last night there were no flesh-and-blood intruders in the banana fronds, but they have tried to get at me before. We women pay for our privacy, even in a democracy. Especially in a democracy. The bulletproof glass stars a little when the boys swing their amateur hammers. They make off with my white ironwork chairs instead. The furniture is heavy. The thieves cut themselves on the razor wire, like a Pink Floyd clip: drops of their blood are left behind, eyes staring up from the bricks. They follow me around the garden when I emerge, intact, before the sun is fully up. I feel their gaze upon me. I sluice away the blood so that it doesn’t attract the flies. Everything here is neat and in its place, and I will not be moved. The daylight hours belong to me. I’ve bought them free and clear with every spinster stereotype. It’s a fair swap.
This morning I did what I always do: I drank a cup of English Breakfast Tea at the long wooden table in the shade. There is just enough time to do the sudoku before I have to be at the Observatory Library.
Today I have the old craving for a sesame baguette. I edge down to the KwikSpar in Station Road. My irritable bowel will exact its payment, but I am expecting that too. We make our choices, little and large. In the streets the cars are dead insects, the pavement splotched with last night’s vomit. After a block I stop in the hot, still air. I peer down Trill Road, though there is no traffic: I can hear God, exhaling.
Bouquets of flowers have been tied to the burglar bars of Carte Blanche, the old magenta saloon with its two thin storeys leaning against the clouds. In the old days it was a whorehouse, they say. My friend Clare swears that upstairs there are mirrors on the ceiling – fungal, age-spotted, indistinct.
On the far corner of Trill a few other people have stopped. They are peering in at the windows of Carte Blanche. The bergie lady totters eagerly across the street to me. She wears a copper wig; her hands are claws. In Obs the homeless look like French tourists, like tennis pros. They wait outside the library until it opens and then linger over the day’s papers. Colette prefers You magazine, but only for the crossword.
‘A murder! Last night!’ she says, chatty, thrilled. It is the same tone she uses for telling me that Valkenberg isn’t too far to walk for medication. She holds my arm through my light cardigan and leans on me, as if I am helping her across a busy intersection. I can tell from the scent her degree of crazy. Today Colette smells like an empty dispensary, of lumpy face powder and sweat.
‘Another robbery. They had a gun!’ She crooks a finger to her temple and her wig slips back a little under the force of the jab. ‘That guy – you know that one? – he came out of the bathroom. They weren’t expecting him.’ She leans closer. ‘Pow! Pow!’
We stagger and right ourselves. She strokes my arm. I disengage it from her grip. She resettles her wig, strokes it like a small animal curled over her ears.
‘Do you have a little something for me, lady?’
I go back home. I don’t want to know who that one was, or absorb the shock and the sorrow of other people. I am clear of the sickness of attachment.
But still. I come back the next day: my shift finishes at the library and the last bulging schoolbag is searched and surrendered to the street. I whisk back home. Once I am there, the aimlessness returns. In the last legitimate hour of daylight I walk up and down on the feverish bricks, homeless, resentful. Regret, regret: I’m sick of it. Better to know than not to know.
I lock up the house again and walk back up Trill. Everyone else has left – the police, the gawpers, the sitters at their rickety pavement tables – so I can sidle up to the window. Did the gunslinger stand tall on the warped floorboards? Did he take calm aim for the execution? Or were they stuttering boys in peaked leather caps, underpants showing when they knocked over the chairs?
There were never this many flowers in Obs gardens. There is a note, too. It says, Friends, we are gathered at the Armchair Theatre if you would like to join us. It is unsigned. I peer in through the glass but the place looks as it always does, like a set, the bottles blinking sleepily behind the bar.
I scurry to the corner and along Lower Main, in quick right angles to the evening light. The A3 posters are tied to the lampposts, his martyred paper face in its oval of roses, ringed and familiar as a wrist corsage: roses for romance, roses for mourning, roses for sighing and weeping.
Inside the Armchair Theatre there are no wailing women beating their chests or throwing themselves on the coffin. There are six plain people, sitting at the counter in the gloom. Some of them turn to squint at me, red-eyed, polite with grief. They are sipping whisky, I think, the funeral firewater. In the low light it catches the flashes through the windows: passers-by go about their business even on days when people have died.
I stand there in my pilling cardigan. I fold my hands, devoid of date stamps and empty of books. I cannot explain why I am here. They nod their heads and assume I am a friend. I introduce myself, but give only my first name. They invite me to sit down, to do the thing that makes us companions – to have a drink with them.
I perch on a barstool, my buttocks conforming to its ridges. It is a long way down. I sip on an experimental Coke in the coolness. The bottle is dewy; it gets away from me but I grip it hard. I wait, and then I can’t wait. I ask about the funeral arrangements: I hope these sad people will tell me his name.
One blue-eyed man slumped over his drink takes pity on me. ‘They’re thinking of taking Justin back to Kimberley.’ Kimberley. My guts bubble. I nod. I pass him money for the Coke.
He won’t let me pay. I slide back down off the bar stool, straighten my skirt, mumble my thanks. He cocks his head and gives me a hard glance: that look rebounds around the room. I bumble home to my quiet house, my heart humming with sugar, dozy as a rose beetle.
Twenty years ago, in another time, my brother and I visited those boys on the weekends when their parents were out. We had braais and played Quarters on the kitchen table, drinking whatever we could find in the drinks cabinet – Coco Rico, Tia Maria, bottles with palm trees on them, the ones that were shoved to the back. I played Quarters with the boys on the Formica for years, until I was sixteen, and then one of the brothers got drunk and asked me to marry him. I think he meant it. I couldn’t go back: between us was the question that I hadn’t expected, and the answer that wasn’t the one he wanted.
On the day of the funeral I trudge up Trill again. I must check on the flowers. How many bunches? How long will they take to decay? Today, twenty bunches, and seven bead-and-wire flowers wound around the bars. Most bouquets have mummified in the heat, but the tally is skewed: people keep replacing them.
A group of kids watches my mathematics. They loll on the other side of the road, wearing Sex Pistols shirts and smoking. No one is allowed inside, so they’re holding his wake in the street. I recognise one of the waiters from Carte Blanche. He’s had no work since Justin died on the floor there. They nip from a half-jack of Klipdrift, push each other, kick idly sideways at a Telkom box. One of them stands with a can in his hand: his key chain jingles defiance. He spray-paints a message on the tarmac. In orange it promises, Jack WE’LL Miss Ya. It will stay there until thousands of ordinary feet wear it off.
We make our way unwillingly to the church. St Patrick’s is full. We examine each other; it gives us something to do. The delay stretches out – half an hour, an hour. The undertakers fiddle with straps and bolts. A wave of heat rises from the moving bodies in the pews. The men remove the jackets of their wool suits, but they smell of aftershave and circuses, profane.
The ceremony begins. A tiny black man in gold slave earrings toddles up the aisle; a brush-cut white guy in a butcher’s coat strides behind. Here comes an Indian girl in a matric dance dress, hobbling on crutches; then the KwikSpar till girls; a woman with a nose that looks out of joint until I see her terrible burns. She has been remade in the semblance of womanhood. I see the long-ago doctors standing by, each with a piece of the puzzle to hand: How does it fit? Does this bit go here? She hides herself, lost in the procession of people I have seen and not seen who’ve been there all along – waitresses and hairdressers and dawdlers from all over Obs.
People keep faltering in, late, from somewhere else. There is no place to sit, so they must stand in the foyer and peer at the priest. They have to shuffle out of the way when at last the coffin is wheeled past them and up the aisle. The dead man’s brother, my old playmate, is sweating with nerves and drink and realisation. His big hands dangle uselessly from his cuffs, as ringless as mine, pestered by the ghost of the old gold band. He tries to carry the lacquered box but it rejects him: his palms slip off the varnished corners. He wipes his face. Will no one help him?
He falls back as the others hustle forward. The rest of the ceremony is anonymous, terrifying. In my flesh shall I see God.
After the service the coffin is lifted more efficiently, as if it was robbed while we were looking the other way. The undertakers slide it into their hearse while bagpipes play. The black car coughs forward, eager to get to the crematorium, skids at the stop street and disappears into the traffic. We stand forlorn in the gardens of the church, long after the exit of the hearse, waiting in the dappled shadows of the hedge as the light dims.
For days afterwards – it is going on still – you will be in the queue for bread in a shop and hear the same conversation.
‘I saw you at the funeral, man.’
‘How did you know him?’
And so on, each to each, tracking each other like bees, for protection, for decency, for love.
Do you have a little something for me, lady?