WE GET A LIFT to the party with a girl called Sanne (forgetting the red rose on the bar) and the girls chat in Danish in the front. The language is full of vowels strung together and I wish I had learned some Danish from Lars. All I know in Danish is how to order a beer, and I’d been too scared to try it out on the panther girl. And I know how to say I love you. But the chance of uttering those words is fading fast.
At the party I am introduced to Jens and Lars and Bo and other tall blond vikings who cluster at the kitchen window to smoke grass. It is hard to keep Zelda in sight for she flits flirtatiously and elusively from cluster to cluster. My heart reels out after her as she kites away on the gust of a whim.
Once she comes back to draw me towards another cluster of Danes outside the toilet door, gathered there because the beer is chilled in the bath. I don’t catch the names but I think they are also called Jens and Lars and Bo. They want to know my feelings on apartheid and injustice and Nelson Mandela. Their questions are prefaced by: As a white African, how do you feel?
I can hear a man peeing as I reel off the words:
– I am not like the white South Africans you see on the BBC, in films. I condemn it.
But all I truly feel, as a circus freak, the white monkey, is every nerve and fibre under my skin wanting to kiss Zelda.
In the end, when the beer and the grass have gone to my head, Zelda comes back and takes my hand.
– Let’s go.
We go along the Gammel Strand, the old fish harbour. The sea wind gusts the blurry fuzz of the grass out of my head. At Nyhavn, Zelda buys us Underground ice-cream in tubs. And we walk all along the deserted harbourside to the mermaid’s rock, ice-cream melting on our tongues. I dare not mouth my hopes of tasting her lips and her skin again.
The tide comes in and islands the mermaid from the land. We sit there on the railing together while the moon dances on the sea, the same vanilla moon you can see from a farm at the far edge of the Atlantic, when the blood-orange sun goes down.
– I only have a visa for a fortnight. Then I don’t know where to go. If I go back to South Africa the police will pick me up at the airport. If I go back to England, the customsmen may not give me another tourist visa. I’m in a catch-22.
– Shhh, whispers Zelda. Worry tomorrow. For now you’re with me.
It is true. I am with the girl I love.
– I read your poems, Zelda whispers.
Then she tilts her face so I can kiss her. Her mouth is humid, her feral tongue forays deep into me, telling me she is no dream.
Then, as if awakened by the far windy whisper of a Zulu sangoma’s murmuring over scattered bones and cowrie shells, the mermaid slides from her rock into the sea. She heads out of the harbour, bound south for Cape Town to ferry Nelson Mandela across the shark-finned bay.
6,000 miles south one lone soul, a flapping scarecrow of a man, walks the long road from Paarl to Franschhoek. All day long he walks, guiding a Firestone tyre with two criss-crossed poles. As he walks, he mutters rumours of blood. It is hard to tell if the raggedy man is coloured, or white gone dark under the sun. Maybe the day will come when no one bothers if he is one or the other.
He walks under azure skies. He walks when snow lies on the Franschhoek mountains. He walks all day, until the sun goes down, blood orange, behind the Simonsberg.