THE BUTCHER BEHIND the counter holds a piece of fillet up, a bemused grin on his face.
‘Yes, that one, the thickest one, with filet always it must be the thickest one, not the biggest but the thickest.’ Two male fingers are wide apart and the eyes are sparkling with gluttonous anticipation. ‘The cooking process always makes it shrink.’
Crazy foreigner, the butcher is thinking, but he pays my rent.
I look away casually, as if the little scene between the two men is a minor diversion that caught my attention and no longer interests me. But the woman serving at the cold-meat counter has to ask twice − Next? − before I react. My stomach has turned to mush. It’s not just the French accent, which is stronger than Daniel’s, but the tone of what seems unmistakably like arrogance that’s built into the discussion of food. Arrogance doesn’t quite describe it. It seems ridiculous, extraordinary, but, on this commonplace Saturday, the Frenchman at the delicatessen meat counter is the most passionate person in the room. He cares deeply about that piece of fillet and its thickness; he will have no other, and it is hardly his fault that he sees this so clearly and the trained butcher does not.
My hands are shaking so hard with the remembered familiarity of it all – the insane overriding Saturday morning urge to buy the freshest of everything at the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock, Daniel marching out of the open market like a conquistador – that I find it difficult to open the zip of my purse and extract my credit card.
‘This should be enough yes? A piece of filet, nice and thick, it is a very good piece of meat, some marinated pork and two chicken kebabs.’ Just behind me, the Frenchman is talking to his local friend.
It doesn’t look enough for two hungry men to me. At a real South African braai you can eat as much meat as you like – there’s always extra left over that goes into the fridge for tomorrow’s lunch. Daniel had the same approach to a braai as the Frenchman behind me. He was always very specific about weights and quantities. I’d say 10 slices; he’d say 100 grams and very thin. Meat was carefully selected in appropriate quantities, always just enough. There were hardly ever leftovers in our fridge. The fastidious food-lover part of Daniel deplored excess uneaten food because warming food up meant it was no longer fresh. The other part struggled with seeing anybody that looked hungry. He’d pack it away in the fridge, carefully wrapped in cling wrap, and next day it would be gone. Sometimes he’d give it to the hobos at the beach who’d share it with their dogs. Other times he’d give it to a kid on the street.
The local friend nods, comments on how hectically busy the place is. He’s clearly not a regular. The Frenchman boasts how he eats there often, how he chooses his own piece of meat and they cook it for him. This one-upmanship snobbery around food is so much like Daniel that tears prick at my lids; it used to drive me mad. Why did he have to act as if he was the only person in the shop who knew anything about food? Daniel had always looked puzzled, and a little hurt, at my comments about his arrogance, as if it was something over which he had no control.
‘This will go well with a Shiraz, this with a Pinot,’ the Frenchman behind me says, shifting the freshly wrapped meat packs in his hands gently to indicate as he speaks, ‘and the chicken will go with bloody everything.’ He laughs at his own joke, and the friend looks suitably awed and impressed.
He’s nothing like Daniel really, his accent is harsh and his hair is stone-blond and short – I wouldn’t want him to touch me – but this overwhelming desire hits me to ambush him and take him home to the apartment and blindfold him and feed him gourmet titbits. I’d just have him talk about food, not about anything else, because something tells me that on every other topic he’d disappoint me.
My mind skips to my father. For a long time I congratulated myself on how different Daniel was to my runaway father, only to discover that they were similar: both fastidious men, both driven to leave the life they knew behind and seek out a different shrine.
Daniel left for Paris the day after Nicky’s funeral. He reappeared eight years later in my local laundromat, like a beautiful genie emerging from the obscurity of a lost bottle. He claimed to have seen me crossing the road by chance and casually announced he was back in Cape Town, without a word of apology to explain the long years of silence. I’d had no way of reaching him − I had once tried to ask Nicky’s mother but learnt nothing, even though Nicky was my ex-boyfriend and Daniel’s best friend. But I had remained in the city where we first met.
At the laundromat, and then at the coffee shop next door, I could hardly stop myself staring at this sophisticated Daniel, who spoke with a sexy French accent and dressed as if he had stepped out of an advert for l’homme parisien. I was no longer the precocious student, seeking a more sophisticated sexual encounter, but I’d turned at the sound of his voice, and the same mad passion ran like a wildfire through my veins. Nothing had changed; each time Daniel’s green eyes looked into mine I struggled to breathe, terrified he might disappear if I looked away. Under his gaze I struggled to string words together into sentences. I felt as if the most random small movement of his mouth might cause me to leap across the table and bed him right there and then in that public place.
But it terrified me, the unwilled desire that overcame me in his presence, so I played it safe, using my work as an excuse to avoid anything that might have resembled a date or would require inviting him to my flat.
It took a circus date − Daniel said he remembered how much I loved circuses − and an argument about Nicky that felt like the most real exchange we’d had since Daniel’s return, to bring the walls of guilt crumbling down. We had been unable to keep our hands off each other that night. It would take many more nights to sate the sexual hunger that had been put on pause the night of Nicky’s accident.
For my birthday, we took a picnic basket into the long grass on the banks of a farm stream. As I unpacked our picnic, he lay on the grass and stared up at the little white clouds that skipped across the sky, lambs running away from us, on that sunny but windy day.
‘If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets,’ Daniel murmured.
‘Who said that?’ I asked.
‘Murakami,’ Daniel replied. ‘It is an astonishing line, is it not?’
Lulled to a strange sense of contentment by the sight of Daniel lying peacefully on the blanket, the hum of iridescent dragonflies in the background, I asked what had made him come back. He said that he finally realised nothing would bring Nicky back, not even if he paid penance for the rest of his life, and in a moment of weakness he’d booked a ticket and come to find me.
‘You could have called. What if I hadn’t waited? You’re so arrogant!’
He’d looked astonished at my outburst and then explained himself. It was true that I had driven him crazy with desire, and after Nicky’s death all he’d been able to think of was putting as much distance between us as possible, but it hadn’t worked; he’d be doing something, such as preparing a salad for himself, and suddenly he’d have this urge to have me there at the table with him, sharing his salad. This had never happened to him before, he said.
‘Wanting to share your salad?’ I’d teased.
‘Yes,’ he’d said with absolute seriousness, ‘There is always something special that I add, which others don’t like.’
And he’d certainly done his best to forget me, he’d said with an impish deadpan expression. ‘What did that mean?’ I demanded. He’d ignored my question as he tickled me with a speckled guinea-fowl feather and proceeded to apologise profusely for eight long years of silence by playing a long slow lazy game of locating the softest most hidden erogenous zones of my body, kissing them to startled electric bliss, and then running his hand up the inside of my thighs and making me utter startled swallowed yelps with the pleasure of it. We made reckless love under the bright blue sky with only a picnic blanket to protect my modesty, and I didn’t care if passing farmworkers or hikers or bikers or walkers with unleashed dogs, or anybody else, heard us. Daniel wanted me; he had come back for me.
I’m startled out of my reverie by a pointedly loud ‘Bitte!’ from the elderly German woman manning the till, who’s annoyed with me for holding up the long Saturday queue. I fumble with my credit card in one hand and packets of cold meat and cheese and the jar of cherry jam that is for Simone, trying to find place on the small counter.
As the woman packs my bag, the Frenchman behind me makes his plans for what to do after supper that night, something about a new dance club near the Ferrari dealership. My ears strain to hear his voice. If I could I’d pickle it and bottle it and take it home with me.
I get out of there as quickly as I can.
On the drive home a memory resurfaces with vivid clarity. I’m back in the coffee shop, the day Daniel reinserts himself back into my life, and I’m showing him the paperback I picked up from the shelf of second-hand books at the next door laundromat. It’s The Collector by John Fowles. He tells me that Fowles collected butterflies as a boy and that this gave him a superior understanding of the danger of obsession, of the risk of becoming a specimen oneself. When I look up, suspicious of sexual innuendo, I see that his eyes are gleaming with mischief. All these years later, I still have that book but Daniel has disappeared.
Tell me a secret (III)
https://secrets.net/chatlounge/
(Everyone. Has one. What’s yours?)
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diable: |
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Have you done it? |
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butterfly: |
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Yes |
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diable: |
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Was it difficult? |
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butterfly: |
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No. I took the key when she was asleep and made a copy. She never even noticed |
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diable: |
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So what did you find in the secret chamber? |
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butterfly: |
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Nothing yet |
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diable: |
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Keep looking. You’ll find something. We all do sooner or later |
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butterfly: |
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We? |
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diable: |
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I’ll tell you one day. When you’re ready |
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butterfly: |
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More mommy’s boys? |
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diable: |
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And daddy’s girls |
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butterfly: |
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The DIY babies club? |
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diable: |
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Smart butterfly. Do you want to join? |
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butterfly: |
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Mine’s awol |
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diable: |
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Is that what she said? That’s what they all say |
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butterfly: |
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Ha ha. I’ll keep you posted |