BESSIE MALAN NEXT DOOR has a glass eye. It is blue. An ostrich pecked her eye out up in Oudtshoorn. The ostrich thought the eye was a gemstone, or a button. When an ostrich goes for you, the thing to do, my father used to tell Marsden and me, is wave a thorn branch at it. Bessie did not have time to wave a thorn branch.
Bessie Malan’s white hair is a tangled crow’s nest of fishing gut. Her glass eye she puts on a pine stump in the yard to keep an eye on the gardenboy, Matches.
At dusk Bessie Malan comes out with an enamel mug of coffee for Matches and pops the eye back in.
– Yo yo yo, says Matches, as he jives out the gate. He has traded his gumboots for the black-and-white alcapones he wears to joll around town.
A hoopoe has his digs in the dead pine stump.
– Tannie Malan, aren’t you scared the hoopoe will fly away with your eye in its beak? I ask, as Matches’s alcapones tap a jiggedy beat down the tar, glad to escape the mad madam and her voodoo eye.
– Blitz never hits the same bliksem twice, says Bessie Malan, sucking in her lips.
Her teeth lurk somewhere in the murk of her house. I wonder if she ever goes out with all her parts in.
Hope says the marble-eyed widow smokes dagga for the pain in her crooked bones. I am not sure, as I have never heard of whites smoking it. But the way Hope tells it, dagga grows like pumpkins in the Transkei. She says you can smell the sweet tang of it in the townships, through the biting stink of gum burning in steel drums.
One night Bessie Malan jumped from the footbridge into the lagoon and sunk to the beer-bottled sand. A vagabond abandoned a bicycle festooned with his belongings to dive in and save her.
Hope reckons her head was so stoked with dagga she thought she could fly.
– I don’t want you filling the boy’s head with stories of dagga and skollies, my mother scolds Hope, stabbing at a canvas with her paintbrush the way she stabs the jammed lid of a jar of jam to pop the trapped air.
My mother does not look up as I go out. I walk along the lagoon and cross the footbridge Bessie Malan flew from. A bony bird flapping featherless wings. Fishing-gut hair floating on the tide.
In Beach Road I cross at the zebra by the public pool. I stand at the railings, looking down on the pool. Beside me is a black man with his boy up on his shoulders. I recall my Dad holding me up to see the banjos and umbrellas in the Coon Carnival of clowned lips and pink umbrellas and music oozing sweetwine sunshine.
I wonder what the black man tells his boy, who is forbidden by law to swim in this water.
– Ishushu namhlanje, the man says to me, mopping his brow.
– Ewe, ishushu, I nod.
Then I see Marta by the pool in a bikini and my heart goes rikkitikkitavi.
I fish out the screwed-up rand note to pay the woman at the gate to the pool. She folds it out flat with long fingers, as if handling a dirty handkerchief.
On the Kalk Bay harbour wall, as Marsden’s ashes sink, Oom Jan slips a ten rand note into my hand, as if it is my birthday. My mother holds my other hand, and beside her stands my father, head bent down towards the water where gulls dive to taste the floating orange and yellow nasturtium flowers.
She holds Oom Jan’s note up to the sun for the watermark, then she glares at me, as if to say: I know you young men and your tricks. Pool and cinema women are always bitter and wary. They would be doubly wary when Marsden and I stood side by side, as if our mirrored looks were a joke we wanted to play on them.
Marta lies on her stomach on a sarong on the grass by the side of the pool. Her watermelon-motif bikini is unhooked for tanning. Her ginger hair has escaped the pink rubber bands and spills over the border of her sun-faded sarong onto the grass. A wire runs from a radio to her ear. I can just pick up the bass.
– Hi, Marta.
But my voice does not reach through the music. I am not sure if I should touch her. I stand so my shadow falls over her face. Sensing that the sun is gone, her eyelids peel back and she squints green eyes at me. Her fingers hook up her bikini. I glimpse a sliver of untanned breast. One hand turns the radio down and the other finds her shades.
She rolls over, with the shades hiding her green eyes and the watermelon motif taut over her small breasts.
– Hi, Marta.
– Hi, she says, tentatively.
– It’s me. Douglas. Remember, from the train.
– Oh ya. Howzit?
– Fine.
She shifts up to make space for me on her sarong. I sit on the edge, almost touching her skin.
She rattles a box of Beechies gum at me and I finger one out and chew it. The orange flavour fills my mouth.
I look up to see the black man and his son, still at the railings. I hope he will not see me, but he does, and waves. I wave back, feebly.
– You know I once saw you on the beach, says Marta. I was running with Shadow, my dog. You were walking on the beach with your surfboard. You had undone the leash and it dragged in the sand behind you. Shadow went after it as if it was a rat. He got it in his teeth and ran and jerked the board out of your hands.
She laughs.
– I think it was my brother.
– Oh. Sorry. I heard about your brother.
My eyes lasso a seagull, follow it till it fades in the haze. Then I study Marta’s pierced earlobes. My mother says it is cheap girls who pierce their ears. My mother still wears clip-on earrings. She says the Hindus in Durban may run hooks through their skin, but she will not scar the temple of God.
– How does it feel, to be alone? Having been a twin.
I gaze up at a hang-glider surfing the sky.
– I’m sorry, whispers Marta. You don’t have to tell.
I shrug.
– I still feel as if I am a twin. I still feel as if he sees me, as if he knows my thoughts.
– That’s so mystical, says Marta.
There is a lull between us, as I have not thought of it as mystical, and I want to think it out for a moment. But my eyes focus on her earlobes again. It looks like a fish hook in the skin.
– Did it hurt?
– For a few days. You have to rub rum on the ring and keep twiddling it.
I do not tell her my mother would think she is cheap.
– Do you like it?
– I think it’s cool.
But it is a lie because it reminds me of a time I got a fish hook in my finger so deep it hooked in the bone. It is the finger that is the barrel if you mimic shooting a gun, and your thumb is the cock. The doctor had to cut it out with a blade. Glancing at the arrowhead scar I feel a sick lilt in my stomach.
– Grazie, she says.
– How come you know Italian?
– My father is Italian.
– Italian is such a musical language.
This is something I have heard my mother say. She loves Fellini films. I grasp for Italian words but only pizza comes to mind. Then I remember gelato.
– A word like gelato. You could say it over and over again just for the sound of it. But there’s no music in ice-cream. Maybe you could teach me Italian?
– Okay. Zanzara is mosquito.
– Zanzara?
– Good. And a piovanello is sandpiper, and farfalla is butterfly.
I wish I could stay forever, the damp from her bikini seeping into my shorts and the orange Beechie in my mouth and zanzara and other exotic sounds in my head.
– Your hair is so blond from surfing, she says.
The truth is, I rub lemon juice into my long hair so that it fades faster in the sun.
– Your hair is beautiful, I say.
I touch her frizzy ginger hair and she tips up her shades and stares her green eyes at me. I want to kiss the bare patch between her eyebrows, but the chittering girls from the train flock up to us and snatch Marta’s green eyes away from mine.
I walk home barefoot along the tar. A fluke high tide has sent salt water over the sandbank into the lagoon. A dead seagull floats on the water and fish worry it.
Zanzara zanzara zanzara zanzara zanzara
My bare feet hopscotch along, dodging the cracks in the paving as Marsden and I used to do, long ago, when we still believed in manhole bears.
hip hop
skip and
froghop
springbok
kangaroo
didjeridu
My name is Douglas. I am alive, though part of me, the me in Marsden, is docked. In one pocket I carry my father’s Zippo and pocket knife. In the other pocket small change mixes with orange coral seeds. Perhaps it is true of the seeds, that they bring good luck.
I fall asleep whispering Marta’s name into my pillow.
Green fish drift through swaying orange seagrass.
My head flies off the pillow. My heart pounds. My mind ferrets after the sound that woke me, frantic to catch it, defuse its horror by defining it, naming it. But all hint of the sound is gone, skoon out of my head. All I hear is the familiar ragged volley of Chaka’s blunt barks, listlessly echoed by the other dogs of the neighbourhood.
The floorboards, cool under my bare feet, creak like a yacht mast in the wind. The zebra skin on the wall brushes against my skin. My mother stirs on the orange sofa in the front room. From the lip of a tipped glass, wine seeps into the floorboards. A candle on the window sill has burnt to a stub, oozing wax over the edge. The incense joss has gone out long ago, leaving a trail of fish-shit ash. Yet the smell of jasmine lingers, a wistful afterthought.
The kitchen door swings in the breeze, the moon glints off the lino. I sense that the sound came from out there, beyond the kitchen steps where Hope often sits and peels sweet potatoes into her apron at dusk.