13

DRINK AND CUPCAKES

IN THE ALMOST EMPTY OUTSPAN BAR LATE THAT EVENING, Benjamin stood polishing glasses as he listened to Eddie’s rambling. Tonight he was going to make his fortune buying up mineral rights in Crocodile Flats and selling them to Rio Tinto.

‘It’s the non-precious metals that make the money now,’ he opined, wagging the forefinger that wasn’t wrapped round his glass. ‘Titanium. Manganeshe. Zinc. Chromium. All the industrial shtuff nobody pays any attention to ’cause they’re meshmerised by gold and platinum. Not me. Not Eddie Drinkwater. I know for a fact that there’sh plenty of ’em under our feet. A geol’gist who came through last month wash telling me—’

Benjamin’s patience was wearing thin. Only that afternoon he’d had a second, even more unpleasant, meeting with the bank manager in town, who’d said as he walked in the door, ‘You’ll reach your overdraft limit next month, Mr Feinbaum. And what are you going to put up as collateral then? I won’t accept the hotel.’

Benjamin started to say, ‘My Uncle Theo—’

‘You can’t count on your Uncle Theo. He says the Outspan is finished and he’s not willing to lay out another cent. Quite the opposite. He informed me yesterday that he’s decided to extend the bond on his house instead. Wife wants an en suite bathroom with a bidet.’ The bank manager’s face left Benjamin in no doubt as to what he thought of sexually suspect foreign devices.

‘My mother—’

‘She phoned too. One more month, and that’s it.’

‘A month is all I’ve got?’ His family had abandoned him.

The bank manager’s smile was an oil slick with teeth. ‘I’ll be generous, give you an extra week. Thirty days from next Friday, seeing as it’s November.’

He didn’t ask the buffed blonde secretary to show him out – to Benjamin’s profound relief, because he was awkward with women. He’d never managed to ask a girl to the movies, let alone go steady with him. Despite all his widowed mother’s efforts.

‘Have I tried with that Benny of mine?’ she’d moan at her friends at their book club mornings and bridge afternoons and charity evenings. ‘God knows, I’ve tried. But would he look at any of the girls I lined up? No. Would he even make an effort to dress for the occasion? Nothing doing. Now even the desperate ones ignore him. Plus, he’s given his uncle ulcers. Theo gave him the Outspan Hotel to run and the bottle store, but still he can’t make even a tiny profit. If a person can’t make a profit with a bottle store, he’s a—’

At this point, Benjamin’s mother would clamp her hand over her mouth, unwilling to say out loud what everyone already knew: her only son was a klutz.

In the bar, Eddie was droning on. ‘You know how they tell? They drill a deep borehole and drop down a shtick of dynamite and shet it off. Then they measure – you know, measure? – the shound waves with—’

He drifted into a fog of Klipdrift, having forgotten what he was talking about. After a while his head slumped on the bar counter among the stained beer mats.

Benjamin put down his polishing cloth and went round to Eddie’s stool. ‘Come on, Ed. Time to go home.’

‘Never—’ He lifted his arm to punch, but it was a reflex action. There was no fight in Eddie tonight. He allowed Benjamin to shoo him through the swing doors into the hotel lobby with its empty pigeonholes and narrow stairs where the coir matting thinned in the middle and the register was gathering dust because nobody had signed it for a week.

‘Go home.’ Benjamin gave him a little push towards the front door.

‘No, wan’ more—’

‘Go home. And bring money tomorrow to pay your bar account.’ Unable to get angry with the poor guy, Benjamin shook his arm to press the point. ‘You owe me, remember? And I need it now. I’m desperate.’

The words penetrated where others hadn’t. Eddie’s wavering head came up and his bloodshot blue eyes met the worried brown ones. ‘How mush, eh? I’ll pay your bill firsht. Favour for a friend.’

‘Will you remember tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow’sh another day older an’ deeper in debt.’ Eddie gave him a sozzled grin and shambled down the steps onto the tarmac.

‘Careful!’ Benjamin ran after him and steered him along the gravel verge towards the trading store, where Khanya would answer his fumbling ring at the door and put him to bed. ‘Try and walk straight, Ed.’

‘Shtraight as a die. Nightie-night.’

As he watched the retreating back, Benjamin wondered what drove a man to those depths. Would he too end up badly? He had just over a month before the Outspan was repossessed and another failure notched up against him on the family totem pole. Uncle Theo would shake his doleful head and mutter about ingratitude. His mother would feel shamed by her friends, who all seemed to have successful sons. His sisters would feel sorry for him. His nieces and nephews would call him Benny Boekwurm and laugh.

There was a squeal of brakes as a police van slid to a stop in front of him, bucking potholes and swerving to avoid Eddie’s oblique progress.

Captain Ngobese leaned over to the passenger window and rolled it down. ‘Feinbaum? It’s a good thing he’s not driving. I could cancel your bar licence.’

‘I refused to serve him half an hour ago,’ Benjamin pleaded, ‘but he wouldn’t leave.’

‘He ought to be walked home.’

‘There’s only me on duty at the bar.’

‘You should delegate someone or he’ll walk into a car,’ the captain persisted.

‘Sorry, sir.’ Benjamin was used to apologising. ‘I don’t think he can keep going much longer, actually. They’ve sent for his daughter from Joburg. The trading store is in big trouble.’ Not as big as mine yet, Benjamin added to himself.

‘Okay, noted. Thanks.’ The Captain engaged gear and drove off again, heading for home. His wife would have left his dinner drying out in the warming oven, fed up with his working late again. This new posting was a maelstrom of corrective action, organisation and paperwork.

‘Night, Captain,’ Benjamin called after him with equal misgivings.

Booze was big in Crocodile Flats and the ramifications of its abuse created the worst problems. In the late afternoons, the verges on both sides of the main road were clotted with men heading for the Outspan bar or bottle store or a shebeen.

Beer and brandy were the hot sellers, followed by cane spirit and vodka. For those who preferred traditional beverages, the shebeens had keenly priced home-brewed mahewu, skokiaan, barberton, blue train and, in season, puzipula.

Since women often chose a glass or two of sweet box wine from the bar fridge, any male who drank wine was branded a moffie. Father Liam excepted. No one who had seen him striding about the settlement with the rubber-tyre soles of his sandals slapping the earth and burly shoulders straining his cassock could take him for a moffie, despite what they read in the papers about some Catholic priests.

Father Liam had let it be known that so profound was his disgust at the revelations coming out of Boston and Ireland, he would flatten anyone who even mentioned choirboys in his presence and pray for forgiveness afterwards.

Gin was the exclusive choice of the elderly whites. They made brave jokes about having the first spot when the sun sank over the yardarm, but most could only afford one tot a day, and not always with tonic. Lemon cordial and water had to suffice, seldom with ice. Black pensioners, many the sole support of generations of their extended families, were lucky if they got a cup of rooibos tea when the sun sank over the yardarm.

Tex, a bleak, furious man of few words with a heavy black moustache and virulent chest hair erupting from his vests, ran the café with its noisy automated bakery and lethargic flies. He got up at four to get the bread dough started, then went on all day checking deliveries, taking orders, heating pies and samoosas, frying fish and chips and vetkoek. When business slowed down mid-morning, he baked batch after batch of confectionery – vanilla cupcakes, Swiss rolls, rock buns, jam doughnuts – all displayed on wire racks in the window to be ogled by passers-by.

Lumps of anger multiplied in his neck and shoulders during busy afternoons, heating his rage to lava. He was sick of dealing with poor people and their greasy coins, and skollies who swaggered in and gave him orders as though he was a servant. Sick of the conspiratorial knots of school kids who’d steal you blind if you didn’t watch them. Sick of slaving his guts out for a bare living. He was deadbeat by eight when the café closed and he stopped shouting at the lazy bugger who stocked the shelves and swept the floor.

Except on Thursdays, when he slammed the door shut at six and spruced up to visit Elsie’s Escorts in town, bearing a box of vanilla cupcakes. In the company of prostitutes he became Texeira de Freitas Rodrigues da Costa again for a few hours, the well-mannered son of a good Lisbon family, taking tea in the parlour before squiring one of the girls to bed. Always a different one. He did not want to get involved past the necessary act of relief.

Tex had been lucky once. Blessed with the names of his four grandparents, pampered as an only son, he was sent to agricultural college and then to Angola to manage the family’s thousand-hectare cattle farm.

Five fantastic years, he remembered with bitter clarity every time he drove the clapped-out bakkie that was all he owned now. Beautiful wife, two babies, prospering hacienda. Fat cattle. Irrigated pastures. A fleet of farm machinery. Plenty of money. Protection paid monthly to Jonas Savimbi …

In vain. The South African Army and their cohorts had joined violent battle with the Cubans within view of the front door and it was all destroyed: the house, sheds, trucks and tractors blown up, the pastures burned, the cattle slaughtered. As he crouched paralysed next to his bakkie in the bush on a hillside where he’d been mending a fence, he saw his wife and babies shot and the Savimbi thugs driving away, laughing.

Inconsolable at being unable to defend them, he waited weeping until dark, then fled in the bakkie with its wheels bumping and sliding over bodies in places. First to Namibia, then via a long decline of failing cafés to Crocodile Flats. There had been no point in going home to Lisbon. His wife had been brown, their babies burnished copper like plump little toffees. The good family considered their four noble names sullied. Now he was just Tex who ran the café: a grim, stubble-faced, bitter nobody.

The doctor was the only person in the village who knew about Tex, having wormed out his history before treating him for syphilis when he first came to the village. Dr Ulrich had done his year as a houseman in a Namibian hospital when the victims of that brutal war straggled south: people with their limbs blown off by landmines, blank-eyed women, uncomprehending children, soldiers hardly out of their teens dazed by the orgy of killing. At the end of his internship, he took a job on a remote mine in Botswana where the injuries were caused by malfunctioning machines and falling rock, not madmen.

‘You must be more damn careful,’ he berated Tex as he wrote out the penicillin prescription. ‘Use a condom, man. Sex workers are riddled with HIV.’

‘Do I look as though I care whether I live or die?’ Tex mumbled.

‘That’s your choice. But don’t lay contagion on clean women.’

‘Are there any clean people in this world?’

Dr Ulrich’s answer had kept Tex in the village longer than any of his former places of refuge. ‘More than you imagine. Even in this godforsaken place where the wind blows dirt into every crack.’

‘I don’t believe in God any more.’

‘Nor do I. But how do we know we’re right? That’s the conundrum. There’s not a shred of proof either way. The unsolvable riddle, eh?’

Tex’s vanilla cupcakes had a thin crown of icing topped with half a glacé cherry, the ultimate village treat. On bad days when kids’ faces squashed on the window reminded him of his babies, he wept unseen into his frying oil.