THERE ARE PEOPLE who prowl the Camps Bay promenade. I don’t know how I never saw this before but I didn’t. There used to be something reassuring about the tables on pavements, the sun encompassing sea, sky, ski crafts, deckchairs, firm bronzed bodies acing a volleyball back and forth, the men with sunglasses watching the women in bikinis pass by, the hormonal teenagers eyeing the talent, the exuberant kids playing in the surf. There was a kind of known order about it. Daniel’s absence and my attempts to find him, by arranging encounters with other men who worked deep within the secretive labyrinth of RMI, made me see everything differently.
Now I saw stiletto heels and gorgeous languid women draped over restaurant chairs; the beautiful male gigolos, such as the tawny-skinned Argentinian Manolo whose services I’d once rejected, sitting on a chair on this very promenade acting like any woman looking for her next lay; the horny middle-aged spouses whose eyes began to wander as they downed another glass of Chardonnay or Pinot Noir; the champagne-drinking cougars and their cubs; and the abandoned lovers looking for that night’s party. Sometimes I felt sorry for the older men assailed by the sight of so much soft skin and fresh beauty served up on a platter. I marvelled at the mothers who dressed their girls like little adults, their breasts flat as pancakes, but still something disturbing about the rosebud mouths and the exhibition of their budding wares, as if there might be an upcoming beauty pageant or the girls might learn how to comport themselves for prospective buyers in the crowd. The other night, surfing the net on the old desktop PC in the study, searching, always searching, I came upon two four-year-olds doing the salsa at a Portuguese salsa club. I watched it a second time, astonished by how they had so perfectly absorbed the ways of adults.
Occasionally on a Friday, in a moment of self-indulgence, I’d drive over Clifton and into Camps Bay down the promenade. It was a longer, more circuitous route to get home but it reminded me of Daniel and how he always called it ‘the sunset boulevard’ with an odd note in his voice, as if the luminous beauty of it pained him. As if he, knowing more than I did, could never take its beauty at face value. This Friday was one of those windless balmy summertime evenings when the whole world had left work early to have drinks at sunset, so it probably wasn’t the best decision, but here I was. The beach road took traffic past Camps Bay sport club, which has possibly the best-positioned soccer field in the universe, since it is built on a flat rise overlooking Beach Road and has an unobstructed view of the oscillating azure bay. I was making slow progress in the promenade traffic when my peripheral vision picked up movement on the field close to the fence: a tall rangy youth was knocking a soccer ball around with a much younger boy. They made an odd pair: the serious child in the neat striped T-shirt, jeans and takkies, and the barefoot youth with his bronzed shirtless torso and long ponytail. The small boy looked surprised when his foot connected – he seemed happy to chase the ball down rather than kick it – while the over-energetic beach-bum youth fooled around with the soccer ball, balancing on one foot and keeping the ball up in the air with the other, in between gesticulating and yelling instructions.
I caught myself being grateful that Simone hadn’t brought anybody home like ‘this one’. God, I sound like my mother!
The relationship I had in mind for Simone (when she was ready) was one of those first teenage love types where they kissed surreptitiously and then learnt the ropes of sex from each other, and ideally she’d be seventeen or eighteen (at least) before she had full-blown sex with anybody. It was my good friend Monica, always maddeningly pragmatic, who pointed out that it would be better if Simone had sex with someone as quickly as possible so that there was no possibility of ‘those men coming after her again’ with their out-dated patriarchal notions of virginity.
Someone?
We’d been chatting on the stoep of Monica’s home, watching Simone, who lay horizontal on the grass with fanned-out hair and face upturned to the sky, her hands crossed over her chest and her eyes closed, playing at floating out of her body (a notion she’d picked up from a book supposedly written by a Buddhist monk), with the cats lying next to her. Monica said my attitude was making Simone buy into the whole myth that enjoying sex meant you were a slut. Instead of making it something natural. Otherwise she’d have issues her whole life. I didn’t want that, did I?
I asked if Simone had said something.
‘She asked how I’d lost my virginity,’ Monica admitted.
‘And you told her?’
‘Who else was she going to ask?’ Monica said. ‘She wanted to talk about it. She said she hated having men touch her so she’d wondered if she was gay.’
Gay? Simone?
‘Did you stick to the idyllic part or did you share all the lurid details as well?’
‘Relax, honey bunch. She said she didn’t like girls much either. I think she’s going for totally asexual.’ Monica said this in a deadpan voice that made me smile in spite of myself.
‘What else did Simone say?’
‘Something like these were old men, not boys, that were after her and they wouldn’t stop unless she lost her virginity. You have to do something! It’s like a leftover from the Dark Ages.’
‘Have you been on the Internet lately, Monica? Everything changes but nothing changes.’
But Monica was stubborn. ‘She lost her innocence long ago, Paola, but she doesn’t have to be living in this constant state of terror.’
‘She’s just fourteen, Monica! It was different for you.’
Monica was about to say something then she stopped herself and said something else.
‘Honestly? You decided to have sex with that pretty boy who flew out the sky. Why shouldn’t Simone do the same?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’ But it was exactly like that. It had suited me to go with Nicky. I’d liked the rich-boy air he exuded and the fact that all the other girls thought he was hot.
Monica had the last word. ‘All I’m saying is you can either control the situation or let the situation control you. Innocence always dies, Paola, but she doesn’t have to be terrorised into submission by those patriarchal pricks.’
I was furious with Monica for bringing the whole topic out into the open air like that.
I told her if that was what she thought, I couldn’t let Simone spend time with her any more. But Monica has earned the right to say things to me that nobody else dares.
Monica and I went way back. She used to be my landlady, and she was the only person I told about bumping into my long-lost love Daniel at the local laundromat. Monica’s life was an unstoppable rollercoaster. Catastrophe loomed around every corner, and financial insolvency was always a real possibility. I assisted her through the geyser giving up its ghost in spectacular fashion by flooding the house, the sheriff arriving to impound their household contents, and at least two incendiary love affairs, one of which almost ended in a murder. Monica’s mother went from one health crisis to another that year, compounding her daughter’s financial and emotional problems. One night I returned from work to find the house dark and a scrawled note on the kitchen table from Monica. She was at the Chris Barnard hospital. Her mother had been rushed there in an ambulance with pneumonia. Damn, I’d thought. She wants me to keep her company. It’s what she’d do for me. So I’d retraced my steps to the city and found Monica sitting next to her mother’s bed in a public ward. There were various tubes and drips, and the old woman’s lungs sounded as if they were rattling apart. She should have been in a private ward but Monica’s finances didn’t stretch that far. Monica was agitated and morose. Her mother had been fine last night, they’d had her on the nebuliser, and then she’d suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Monica didn’t take her eyes off her.
The underwater light and the distant clinical metallic echoes of a big anonymous hospital reminded me of that safe feeling of being in a church.
‘Do you know, she was fifteen and she’d never even been allowed to talk to a boy when she came to South Africa to marry my father. Can you believe it? Sending your daughter on a ship to a 45-year-old man she’s only seen in a photograph? A matchmaker arranged it all. My mother’s still got the photo of him standing next to his petrol pumps. He had absolute power over her. It drove me crazy the way she let him treat her. I know she doesn’t like it when I bring my girlfriends home but I can’t change who I am.’
‘How old were you when you knew for sure … that you preferred girls?’ I asked.
‘Thirteen. The day I lost my virginity.’ Monica glanced over at me. ‘An older cousin from Greece came to stay with us in her university vacation. She thought she wanted to be a painter, so I’d go along with her and we spent long hot glorious summer afternoons together. My parents had no idea what was going on. I’ve never felt like that again. The sky was bluer and the birds chirped louder. Picnic sandwiches even tasted better.’ Monica grinned. ‘It felt deliciously dangerous.’
The woman in the neighbouring bed was leaning over to hear the conversation better. She’d perked up since I arrived.
I laughed. ‘Deliciously dangerous? You were just lucky your father never found out.’
‘How old were you when you lost your virginity? I’m guessing he was male and movie-star material.’
‘Seventeen.’
‘You didn’t have sex until you were seventeen?’
The woman in the neighbouring bed was now shaking her head. I wasn’t sure if it was in sympathy or in disgust.
‘I was a first-year student, he was second year. I saw him skydiving and I introduced myself. He was gentle in the beginning, later not so gentle.’
‘That’s the thing,’ Monica said. ‘It’s the loss of innocence that really hurts, not the loss of virginity per se. That’s just physical. I wrote to my cousin once a week but she never wrote back.’
On the weekend Simone and I go for a walk to the beach. It’s a sunny Saturday afternoon without much wind, so it’s crowded. She is far ahead of me walking Miss Potter, our blind neighbour’s dog, but as usual her outfit makes her stand out like a beacon, so there’s no chance I’ll lose sight of them. Today she’s wearing checked black-and-white skinny trousers with a longish black T-shirt that hangs off one shoulder, showing her white bra strap, but I’m relieved she’s more or less covered up. I have visions of bumping into someone who knows me from way back then, someone who’ll think I’m doing a poor job as a girl’s mother. It’s funny because that’s not really the person I am. Or was. I’ve always just got on with it and done things my way, hang the consequences or other people’s unwanted opinions. But I’ve now accepted that being responsible for a child makes one go soft.
Up ahead Simone almost stumbles as she hauls Miss Potter’s lead in and steps hurriedly out of the way of somebody on a weird contraption. He swerves to a stop on the grass and waits for her. They talk briefly, and then he leaps back onto his board and hurtles on. An entire row of people on the footpath, including me, manage to jump out of the way just before he tears past us, one large tanned bare foot pumping energetically at the ground like a piston, the other planted firmly on the foot bridge. The perverse choice of locomotion looks like an aluminium kick scooter that’s been integrated with a skateboard so it now has four wheels. I recognise him instantly as he goes whizzing past, a superhero on a mission, ignoring the beachgoers who scatter before him; it’s the soccer-playing hippie older brother of yesterday. Simone is still standing there, watching him go, leonine mane in his wake, when I catch up to her. The self-assured girl I’m used to has a thunderstruck expression on her face.
‘Crazy moron,’ I mutter.
‘Rad!’ she declares, apparently oblivious to the havoc being wreaked on the pathway.
‘Simone …? What is that contraption anyway?’
‘He’s a freestyler,’ she says thoughtfully, her eyes narrowing as he recedes into the hot midday glow. ‘It’s meant to be like a Fuzion. They are so cool.’ A friendly Labrador has in the meanwhile approached to make Miss Potter’s acquaintance. Simone yanks the lead to remind Miss Potter about being a lady and prods the sniffing Labrador away with her foot.
‘Do you know him?’ I can’t help asking. Other girls her age have boyfriends but Simone appears uninterested. ‘What did he want?’
Simone swings round to look at me, her eyes intense and bright. ‘No, I don’t know him. He’s just some random idiot. Can I get one for my birthday?’
I have a sudden clear vision of Simone flying down the pathway in tiny denim shorts and a top that flutters and lifts, much to every male beachgoer’s unconcealed delight. I had once been prone to spontaneous utterances like ‘A kick scooter? Isn’t that a bit babyish?’ followed by the inevitable ‘Maybe …’ as she rolled her eyes until my voice dwindled away. ‘Maybe’ has been well and truly mocked out of my system. I’ve learnt to consider my responses carefully if I want to avoid that most bitter of all recriminations ‘You’re so old school …!’ followed by a sullen silence that can stretch into hours. I’m no longer a novice at this mother-daughter thing.
‘Instead of a road scooter?’ I ask carefully. ‘You do know that you can’t get a licence to go on the road until you’re sixteen?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But I look older. Anyway, I don’t want a scooter any more.’
She’s just a teenager pushing boundaries, I remind myself. Don’t spoil a pleasant afternoon.
‘We’ll see closer to the time. Let’s get some ice cream, shall we?’
She gives me a pursed-lip look that says ‘You think I’ll forget, but I won’t’, before dragging Miss Potter across the road to Flavio’s Gelato, where she chooses one ball mango and one ball pistachio, after much intent deliberation. As I’m paying, Flavio tells her the plaits are sexy.
Simone loves dressing up and trying on different personas. Like her father. For the umpteenth time I have to sternly remind myself that Daniel is not her father. He is not even her stepfather. Sadie’s mom let them watch her Woodstock DVD last night. Simone announced this as she flounced into the kitchen, her usual strawberry blonde waves now dead straight and held in place by a headband with little crochet flowers (‘Sadie’s mom sells crochet bikinis at the flea market’) which dangled fetchingly alongside two long thin plaits that framed huge kohl-lined eyes. The story went some way towards explaining why today she looked like something between a fairy from another world and a hashish-smoking groupie.
‘It took forever!’ she grumbled in between spoonfuls of muesli.
‘What did?’ I asked, still amazed at the apparition in my kitchen.
‘The plaits, of course. I’m never ever doing them again.’
‘Luckily you don’t have to dress up for Woodstock every day!’ I said brightly, privately wondering if Sadie’s mother provided the kohl and whether she showed her daughter and friend how to put it on. That was the kind of thing a girl’s mother should do, I supposed. My own mother had never suggested an eye make-up lesson – probably out of fear of my withering response.
As we walk along the shoreline with our cones, dripping ice cream onto the sand, wavelets running up the beach to our feet, Simone happily points out that her ice cream is two cool colours and that fruit is way less calories than chocolate and tiramisu (boring!). When the ice cream is finished, she makes like a spinning top, with Miss Potter yelping in shrill excitement as she tries to keep up with Simone’s dizzy antics. The long fair hair and the fetching thin plaits fan out in the salty wind. On the way back she has fun whipping the plaits that took so much work from side to side, and I keep imagining Sadie’s mother and the girls giggling and laughing in front of a long mirror as they try on different looks and costumes. I try and decipher what this new feeling is. I’m familiar with helplessness but this is something else. Maternal jealousy?
We’re back at the apartment block, walking towards the front doors that will take us to the entrance hall, when she comes to a standstill, yanking Miss Potter back. I follow her gaze to a reclining form on the green lawn in front of the building. He has a floppy grass hat over his face and one large bare foot, lazily leaning on a raised knee, which is tapping in time to music reaching his ears via earphones. The young man and his modified apparatus for locomotion, which is lying next to him on the green grass, are not even two metres away from the sign which orders: USE THE PATH. STAY OFF THE LAWN. Our Sandkasteel committee members take the patch of springy green turf very seriously. Child feet are not allowed on its immaculate surface any more than adult feet are. Mrs Shimansky, our battle-axe committee chairman, has been known to terminate contracts of Garden Service companies who have not understood the need for lawn to be in a pristine condition. Tenants or owners who transgress receive threatening letters in their post box, and fines are imposed. She has also been known to contact the SPCA with regard to dogs that have dared to lose their way and wander onto the lawn to do their ablutions.
I raise an amazed eyebrow. ‘Just wait until Mrs S sees him!’ Simone stifles a giggle but she quickly adjusts her face to look pained and keeps on walking. Later on I glance over the wall of the third-floor corridor but the lanky stranger who looked so comfortable on the forbidden grass is no longer there.
The next day, the barefooted visitor stops washing a Volkswagen kombi that’s parked in a no-wash area to stare unabashedly at Simone as we walk past him to go and do some shopping. He’s in hacked-off jeans surrounded by a pool of soapy water. The dented buttercup yellow vehicle looks as if it has led a life of unbridled lust and danger. In my university days VW kombis were called love wagons. I can’t believe I’m remembering that.
A whistle pierces the Sunday-morning air. ‘Hey, you’re the girl at the beach,’ he shouts out, wringing a cloth at the same time.
Simone ignores him. Her pace doesn’t falter and her pale face is stony. I’m not quite sure what to do so I just walk but I can’t keep up. For a moment I think the barefooted boy is going to spray us with the hosepipe – I can see it in his tensed wrist, something in the expression of his eyes – but he thinks better of it at the last moment. Something tells me he’s not too bothered about water restrictions.
The yellow kombi lurches out as we drive back in. A hanging mobile of what looks like eagle feathers attached to a ring with leather thongs is swinging wildly between the heads of Mrs Shimansky and the strange boy who’s been hanging around the past few days. I can see the old hag clear as daylight on the high seat, hanging on as he accelerates round the corner and past us, charging out the gate into the busy road, the straw hat at a rakish angle.
That boy doesn’t have an off button. I glance over at Simone but she’s looking straight ahead, biting her lip.
Later that afternoon I’m working at my laptop when I hear loud squeals coming from downstairs. Motherhood is still a work-in-progress for me so my breathing stops while my brain screeches to a conclusion. Simone! I rush to the low passage wall, ready to run down and defend her from whatever is making her squeal. A surreal scene on the lawn meets my anxious eyes.
‘Ass-hole!’ Simone screams breathlessly, water streaming down her hair, as she is sprayed by a hosepipe held in the hand of the barefooted youth who has become a fixture overnight.
Most mothers get to see their kids play as they’re growing up, but this is new for me, watching my daughter play.
‘You’re such a princess!’ he yells back. She chases him until she manages to wrench the writhing hosepipe out of young Tarzan’s hand. She holds him at bay while she turns the tap to get full water pressure, chasing him mercilessly with the strong jet of water as far as the hosepipe can go. But he’s stronger and quicker than she makes allowance for, so he manages to get to the tap and soon he has the hosepipe again and she’s getting sprayed, a helpless wet kitten standing in a puddle. She spins around and around, shrieking with a mixture of rapture and terror, clasping her arms across her chest so that no one can see her nipples, until she grabs the hosepipe again and then she loses all self-consciousness. I spot tall, bald Mr Smyth, the committee member in charge of building security, standing next to a pillar. He doesn’t take his eyes off Simone. She’s less developed than other girls her age but in this playful mood she is beautiful and strangely seductive, her fair hair flying and her child-woman’s body dripping water as she turns on her own axis. The air sizzles with electricity.
They keep at it until they’re both thoroughly drenched – there’s clearly a protocol to this game. A small crowd has collected and residents are hanging over the wall shouting encouragement to the two combatants. It must be killing Smyth not to rush onto the lawn. He’s only holding back because the young scamp on the grass is the chairwoman’s guest. The other residents respect Smyth because he takes building security seriously. My neighbour Kiki and I know a different side to him. Kiki and Mr Smyth have had frequent run-ins because he doesn’t like being woken up by her returning home in the early hours of the morning with male friends. I’ve heard him spew terrible obscenities at Kiki under his breath as he walks past her. And since we’re friendly with Kiki, he eyes us with wordless malevolence.
I look over the parapet and see that Mrs Shimansky is also watching the antics on the lawn, her expression stern. At least the old bat says what’s on her mind straight to your face and she’s predictable. She senses my stare because she looks up at me and shakes her head slightly, as if to say that I am somehow once again remiss in my duties.
At last, exhausted by their antics, my daughter and her new male friend collapse on opposite ends of the green grass. Something quivers and snaps. Some of the residents look around in a bemused startled way, as if they’ve woken up out of a trance. One of the fathers grabs his son and throws him high into the air. The other onlookers start dribbling away to their interrupted Sunday activities. Mrs Shimansky walks up to Simone and throws a large towel around her shoulders. Simone takes the towel from her and wraps it around herself, and then, strangely compliant, follows the old woman off the green grass as if she is a small girl, totally exhausted by an exhilarating game she has not played before. The barefoot boy sits up on his elbows to watch her go.
I hear her coming up the metal stairs and by the time she reaches me all the exhilaration has seeped out of her and she is shivering with cold. I push her towards the bathroom and put her under a hot shower, and she doesn’t resist me.
Simone has been an object of curiosity; this is the first time the girl on the second floor has done something so public. Everyone in the flats will be talking about her and young Tarzan over supper: Playing like that on the grass! Wasting all that water when we’ve got water restrictions! What will the committee do? I don’t like her attracting attention. But if I want her life to be like any other teenager’s, how can I say she can’t be in the public eye – what reason could I give? So in the end I don’t forbid anything.
It turned out the old ogress Mrs Shimansky had a grandson Samuel, a music student taking a gap year, helping out with the kids at the soccer club and travelling around the world with his kombi. More like from rich relative to rich relative, I concluded, suspecting that this wild young man was not going anywhere soon, not with such a well-feathered nest at his disposal.
Our char Mabel was a font of information gleaned from her friend Gloria, who worked for Mrs Shimansky two mornings a week. He was from Australia but he had also lived in Vienna and in New York and London. He left his clothes on the floor and his wet towel on the chair and made a big mess everywhere. His grandmother was fighting with him all the time to take shorter showers and put the lights off. He liked it here so he would be staying a while.