JIMI TELLS ME THE guys are out of jail, that they got off lightly as the one being booted had it coming to him. So I know they’re out there, and that they’ve got it in for me. I run my fingers along the stitched centipede on my shaven head. I sense it’s time to run again.
In Covent Garden, the café umbrellas flower like hibiscus against the stone. A rastaman comes up the steps from the Underground toilets.
– Want some acid, brother? Get high for the cost of a pint.
– I’m not sure.
– Hey brother, you live until you die.
– Where you from?
– T an’ T man.
– Tianti?
– Trinidad an’ Tobago.
I give him two pounds and he gives me a corner of blotting paper, which he calls California Sunshine.
– Do I swallow it, the sunshine?
– Jesus. You melt it under your tongue.
He looks at me with pity in his eyes.
– Thanks. Goodbye.
– When I don’t see you, I dream of you, he tunes.
I glance down at the bit of paper in my hand. When I look up again the rastaman is gone. I stand with it in my hand for a long time, feeling self-conscious and imagining that all the bobbies within a mile must smell it, like a shark smells blood, and be homing in on me. In the end, when no bobby comes, I put it under my tongue as the man said, and it feels dry and scratchy for a moment. I wade through the milling faces and colours of James Street and Neal Street, waiting for something to happen.
Down a narrow alley I find a hidden wedge of courtyard called Neal’s Yard, and as I sip mango juice and pigeons flutter up into a yellow sky, the acid blooms in my head.
I stay a long time, holding the rim of the bobbing table, a buoy on a placid sea.
I tread the transparent water at Boulders while jackass penguins glide under me.
Revisiting Delarey’s old bar in Soho, I see soundless footage of Soweto on a teevee screwed to the wall like the TV in the madhouse. David Bowie sings China Girl and I drink a pint. The tuneful song is out of synch with the images: toyi-toyi dustfeet fists guns dogs blood sjamboks barricades and a burning bus with tyres in the sky
Outside in Berwick Street I suck in the colour: yellow honey-dew melons from Brazil, orange melons from Senegal.
– Beautiful ripe mangoes from Ireland, a fruitseller calls.
On the Underground from Leicester Square out to Heathrow I feel so bowed down by the blood and shit in South Africa. But as the train surfaces into the sunlight my mood picks up, for I am soon to see Lars, my pigeon-killing, gate-swinging idol, and Zelda of the sunflared hair and redwine breasts. A tube cowboy in snakeskin boots jumps on and strums Roger Miller’s King of the Road on the guitar. Londoners dip deeper into their newspapers and books, but an old black man across from me instinctively taps his foot.
– Hi folks. Thanks for coming to my show. It’s good of you to come. This next song is a song of hope. I can see clearly now the rain is gone ...
The black man jumps to his feet and jousts his ivory-headed cane in the air as if it is a Zulu assegai.
The lady next to me pulls her skirt down further over her pink knees. Across from me a bank of newspapers hide the heads.
The tube-cowboy comes around with a sack, like a deacon gathering the collection in church. I drop in a coin and the black man empties his pockets.
– Running late folks. Got to do another show. You can come through if you want to.
He jumps out onto a deserted platform and, as the doors slice closed, his head pops up in the next car. You can just make out the tune of King of the Road seeping through.
There is a bus from the airport to the Copenhagen central station where Lars is waiting for me. He’s not the type to reveal his feelings but I skip along at his heels as we walk past the gates of Tivoli through the crowded walkway to Nyhavn harbour. Tall men and women glide by like giraffes. Nyhavn is as pretty as the postcard image in my head: canvas umbrellas like wind-filled sails, dazzling white against the pastel houses and wooden ships and blue sky.
We get hotdogs from a windowed van and Carlsberg beer and feed bits of bread to black-headed seagulls.
We walk along the cobbled harbourside to see the mermaid, past ships moored to rusty rings. She too is as beautiful as in the postcards, but small and close to shore. I had imagined her being on a solitary island you could only reach by boat. As we arrive, tourists tumble out of a bus on to the harbourside and jump across to the rock to touch her and be photographed with her.
So many hands have rubbed her breasts that the bronze gleams like a piano pedal treaded over a lifetime.
– Her original head was sawn off by vandals, Lars tells me. It may be somewhere in the harbour.
Back in Nyhavn, Lars and I sit with our feet dangling over the wall like the Kalk Bay handline boys, drinking Carlsberg. I am excited to be in a place I dreamed of, but wish I hadn’t seen the mermaid surrounded by tourists and that she still existed untouched in my imagination.
We dredge up stories of the farm and the dam and kebabed pigeons and Steely Dan. I tell him about how I found Zelda reading Out of Africa in the Blue Note Café, and how I fell head over heels for her. I tell him about the sarmajoor and the light bulb, about Peejay and the Jay Bay surfers. Lars smiles when I tell him about my kitchenboy flirts with crayfish and old ladies in Devon. It feels good to make him laugh and I want to hold his hand or something because he is so physical a reminder of the valley I pine for.
– You should become a storyteller, he laughs.
Lars knows I am dying to see Zelda and he shows me the way to the Yellow Submarine, past the round tower and up near the north station. Outside the bar, he tunes:
– Leave some of the Danish girls for me. I’ll see you when I see you.
He takes my rucksack for me and gives me a key to his flat. Then he winks at me and walks away as coolly as if we still see each other most days just by crossing the road. Swinging on the gate under a blood-orange sunset. Nero and Fango barking at the squirrels in the stone pines. Tractors rattling by, the trailer bins filled with fruitpickers catching a lift home after a long day in the sun.
I go into the bar full of young folk drinking and chatting and peering through the smoke at backgammon boards and newspapers. Hey Jude on the jukebox.
I sit on a free barstool at the bar and look for Zelda as Hey Jude fades into Strawberry Fields.
Zelda is not there. Instead there is a waitress with black hair and black fingernails and skin so white her fingers look like piano keys, and a predatory panther look. She homes in on me to ask what I want. I want Zelda but I just order a beer.
Big Yellow Taxi comes over the jukebox. Not just the Beatles then. I fleetingly recall Che and Matanga and the Jamaica girls but my heart beats too fast for reverie. Zelda might happen at any time.
The panther comes back with my Carlsberg.
An Indian flowerseller with a white beard goes from table to table, but is ignored. Then he stands in front of me with his forlorn eyes staring into me as if he can see my naked feelings for Zelda, and pities me.
I feel as if all eyes are focused on me, like the old days on the school bus, and I buy one of his roses. He wants 20 kroner, the price of a beer, for just one rose. I dare not quibble, for how am I to know what a rose costs in Copenhagen?
Just then I see another waitress with a tray of beers balanced on one hand. She swings her hips as she weaves through the tables towards the rowdy far corner. They are strong blokes, like the boys in the back seat of the school bus. They peer down her T-shirt as she leans over the table. They joke with her and I see her teeth laugh and only then do I recognise her, for she has dyed her hair red.
And then she sees me and comes to kiss me on both cheeks. For a blurred instant I smell her hair and I want to bury my face in it. I want to feel her breasts squash against my ribs and hold her against me until the bar melts away and leaves us on the edge of the sea again.
But she draws away and says:
– You chose a good time to come. There’s a party tonight, so you’ll meet my friends. We’ll have a good time and catch up on everything. Oh is that for me? How sweet.
And as she leans over the bar to fill an empty Carlsberg bottle with water from a tap, her skirt comes up high. She drops the rose in the bottle.
– Now don’t you dare run away like you did from the army.
And when I most want her to belong to my imagination and to one sublime day in Cape Town, she belongs to the fan-eddied smoke that dims the bar, to the undertones of lust in the jaunty jazz chords, to the leering men. Did I imagine her nipples in my mouth, the nodes of her spine under my fingers?
She swings back to serving tables while I watch from my barstool with the rose in the beer bottle. The men give me dirty looks. But whenever she smiles at me, however fleetingly, she chases the doubts away. Her smile says: You see, the sea is full of fish but you’re still my beach boy.