On a hospital slab. Insides out, body parts in plastic bags, cotton wool taped over eyes. The anaesthetist reaches over and touches a braid of his dying patient’s hair.

Admiring the simple tapestry, he meditates on the day when devoted fingers (whose?) combed and collected each thread of fine hair. Each tightly woven braid the product of what? A mother’s love? Aunt’s persistence? Daughter’s reluctance? Hairdressers indifference?

He will never know though he likes to imagine she laughed at least once during the sitting. Laughter in between shrieks of hair wrenched at the root, laughter delirious on some stoep out in the August sunshine.

As he detaches his machine and watches her body  wheeled unceremoniously from the theatre, he focuses again on this head of knitted hair. Zigzagging contours rising from the neckline.

Each braid: three rapids, tributaries tumbling and tied inseparably into one. Unity, he thinks, unity when everything else has unravelled. Unity in a body come so irrevocably undone.

 A story inspired by Richard Hart’s paintings and first published in his catalogue for the exhibition ‘Kind Pockets’ at the whatiftheworld gallery in Cape Town in 2009

Don’t ask me how it happened, how every man and boy in a community could, one Tuesday morning in June, just drop down dead. That’s right, dead.  Dead while doing whatever it was they were doing. Half way through a sentence or song, mid swing on the golf course or in the playground and well… then there were none. Read the rest of this entry »

With the power and water stations long collapsed and no diesel left to fuel their stagnant SUV’s (let alone the standby generators) life had become near unbearable for the powerless Houton couple– Ned and Nancy Van Der Spuy. Shacked up in their three story mansion in a once plush and functioning suburb they were left with little option but to wait, wait until their number (sixty- five thousand) on the immigration list to Aus would be called. Read the rest of this entry »

Christmas Eve is spent on a roof top. This time the Northern Peruvian City of Harauz. These roof tops are pretty much, much of a muchness, littered with washing lines, water drums and crates of empty Inca- cola bottles.

Places where, amongst the flapping sheets, I may conference (in peace and secret) with my past in it’s current carnations .Safe from being overheard (or deemed insane) by the man on the street. Alas the worried eyes of the land dweller and his land locked imagination.

Dues- ex machina is not my Saints chosen mode of transport and I am yet to see them charioting celestial cloud. No clarion overhead announces their coming, rather raucous laughter and the sound of clumsy feet up an iron stair. So accustomed am I too this sound that I need no longer flinch or pinch myself when they appear before me in the flesh. Rather wait, arms akimbo, foot tapping with mock impatience,saying :What took you so long?

Ah Saint Ric- though he might be Nic (for his head is adorned with silly festive hat) and accomplice Rosalind (his complicit elf).

Ric who greets me with laconic tip of cap (need he say more) then sets about perching on roof top ledge, one leg up, sparking a cigarette, then tune on the trusty Accordion.

To begin, a few obligatory Carols (It is after all Christmas Eve and Rosalind the nostalgiac- insists). Santa Rosa who in her unmistakable tipsy thoothless rathp (The voice of bed time stories as distinctive and familiar as Attenborough is to Nature documentaries) sings what words she can remember.Finally with Bony M formalities out the way, and a version of Silent Night so sad that it might silence all others, Riccardo starts up with a ribald range of Gypsy Tunes. (Acquired, so Ros tells me from a recent jaunt/ haunt amongst the Danube dwellers in Eastern Europe)

That’s the spirit- she cries, hiking up her Mettizo skirt (She has come a traditional Peruvian guise the old sport) taking my arm and spinning me in circles .Rosalind- Saint of the vine and wobbly line (and only just adjusting to the continental confusion that comes with omniscience) complains that she cant find a Checkers in the area to purchase her festive poison: a box of white wine. After reminding her which southern side of the globe we reside, she scuttles off and in no time returns with an adeqaute local variation.

Robbed by the wine of all sense, my Saints of all solitude, our eve on the roof top runs wild. Till Riccardo stops his music and Rosalind slips her hand over my eyes .Warm soft hands, familiar lines of fortune guiding me to the ledge. Nearly twelve she says. Nearly time, whispers Ric.

Clackety clackety clack go the fire crackers on the streets below-like a pair of love sick tap shoes clacking in Morse. I watch a sky set on fire. Roaring rockets and whinging wheels . While both guardians lean forward and take turns to kiss my Saint Chris (look at me- then go astray-urges Ric). I mark their faces in the purple flare, the flecks of fire now sparking from their hair. Feliz Navidad, yells the city at once from their roof tops. So I crow back, with all my voice, Pan rousing Never land-Feliz Navidad!

When I next look they have vanished, but not completely. The exit, as with most things in life, more spectacular than the arrival. My eyes trail the scattered stars of their tails, watching them peter out over the tip of a distant cathedral. Then tumble to the Plaza, two smoking canisters (and just so I know where to follow them next) with Made in China printed on the side.

Maria grew up on the shores of Lake Titicaca in the town of Copacabana.  One couldn’t really call it a childhood, sitting there like that on corner of the Plazuela Tito Yupanqoi at the entrance of the chapel of candles alongside her sickly grandmother. The two of them huddled under what little shade their battered old brolly offered. And this is how each day went: waking before sunrise, lugging baskets of candles to meet the charity of post-work worshippers, pilgrims or tourists. Customer’s who for a mere twenty Bolivianos (and by lighting a candle at the sacrosanct toes of disproving Santa Marta) were able to atone for their weekly sins.

Of course Maria would have far preferred to be in school, but as her widowed grandmother (and only remaining guardian) was destitute, she had to seize what little opportunities life had granted her. Now the candle business was hardly a lucrative one. It was an industry that depended entirely on the collective guilt of villagers and idle curiosity of passing gringo’s. Self flagellation, fear of eternal damnation were metaphysical afflictions that enabled Maria and her grandmother to turn a daily profit. If it wasn’t for devout locals like Carmen Villajuerte Nuñyez, the village adulteress –who on Monday mornings wracked with remorse scooped up their entire stock in her trembling arms– there might have been no point in enduring the heat at all. But endure it they did and in the face of fierce new candle competition, little Maria was frequently left to watch her future prospects melt into an amorphous wax blob.

 Then one August morning, after setting up their stall, securing the umbrella and laying out the candles, Maria’s grandmother plonked herself resolutely on her stool, clasped her hands over a heaving breast, shut her eyes and entered into cat nap from which she would never again rise from. Poor Maria, just twelve years old and too young to fend for herself was forced to relocate to the Andes metropolis of La -Paz. Here she was to live under the roof and guidance of her twice removed relative Uncle Gorge.

Now Gorge was a failed yet indefatigable entrepreneur who cared little for the child rather recognised her as the pretty new face to head up his latest enterprise: a cinnamon ice -ream business at the entrance to the La Paz bus terminal. Gorge assumed the girl, with her sympathetic simper, unblinking almond eyes would excel as a Helado sales girl. As an incentive let her to keep ten percent of her daily takings, takings she had resolved to save in aid of her future education.

So this was how Maria came to join the infamous stretch of Las Chicas Del Helado Canelo (The Girls of Cinnamon Ice Cream) lined along the intersection to the La Paz bus terminal with hapless Maria’s Helado stand nudging the fringes of the bus terminal Baños. This strip of pavement boasted six pretty chica’s all wilting in a row: Paula, Olivia, Gladys, Rosa, Lidia and now Maria–the only one whose feet, when perched on stool, refused to touch the ground.

Of course Maria had not an inkling of what a tiresome task it would be to try sell Cinnamon Ice-cream especially when armed with a helado’s cart so cost effective that it failed to come with any form of refrigeration. Naturally she was to receive a frosty reception from her rivals - each with their own a luminous little ice berg to pawn before profits were reduced to syrupy puddle.

Uncle Gorge’s convictions that he had perfected the greatest helado canela recipe known not just to the Andes, but to all mankind, did little to inspire hope. To the harried passer by, usually late for their bus, it all looked identical. It seemed then that the chica most likely to be crowned helado’s queen for the day was the one whose physical attributes first enticed the predominantly male clientele.

I arrived at this tragic Helado’s pageant, quite by chance. Lost and nearly late for my bus, the heat of noon insisting I stop to sample an icy treat. But from which chica? Paula, Olivia, Gladys, Rosa, Lidia and Maria— I knew this for their names were neatly announced at the base of their helado’s podiums.

“Sinyora, Sinyora, Sinyora” they called out sweetly, insistently, each coo more enticing then the last. Like Ulysses at the mercy of the helados sirens, I fumble, Ulysess the unfortunate wretch hurled into the chica’s den. Time is at stake, time is a missed bus, time is ice dripping through the hour glass. Which one? Which one?

I scan the competition, first setting eyes on Rosa whose garishly painted face and ample bosom ensures she stands out against her more modest competitors. Then Paula whose middle age, sour pout and slovenly slouch makes me think she might be better off selling lemon Sorbet. Beside her is frigid Olivia– cold as the cinnamon cream she towers over, then Glady’s: pretty enough, but such glaring insistence is off putting as ,might I add, is Lidia’s gum-chewing indifference.

Then at last, beside the baños, amidst the persistent trickling tinkle of the urinals, I sight little Maria: a cinnamon ice cream saint, her plight scrawled all over her anxious little face. Maria who does not haggle, bicker or bitch as the others did. Maria who sits patiently, her stoicism enough to implore me to sate myself to sickness on her horribly sweet heap of cinnamon ice-cream.

So I begin to spoon, shovel as if her salvation depends on it. My teeth ache, head pounds, growing woozy with the concoction of colourant and sugar. In under ten minutes and before the other competitors startled eyes, Maria’s Canela mountain is reduced to a mole hill and I race pink faced to meet my departing bus. From the window I see her eager fingers sifting through my coins. Glimpsing in these grubby copper tokens a future beyond all ephemeral matters of wax and ice.

He did not flinch in bidding Paris his hometown adieu: far too petite, too pretentious to contain his irrepressibly itchy feet. At twenty –two he had just completed his degree at an architectural school (a school whose reputation resided more on the bevy of beautiful international students it attracted than the actual qualification it offered). It had been three frenetic years: waking up with pounding head, missed lectures and one very busy bed.

Ironically it was Cecile, a fellow Parisian: aloof, detached and perhaps the most beautiful of them all who remained consistent in her disinterest. God knows, how from the day of their introduction he persisted. A tenacity, that in the weeks leading up to graduation, with the ensuing parties, (the simultaneous dropping of one’s guard and underwear) naming him the conqueror and Cecile the seemingly insuperable –the conquered.

Not surprisingly her frigid demeanour proved to be a facade, a fortress erected to fend off the advances of such opportunists. In their few months spent together he found her to be dangerously affecting. The cause for a foreign and almost terrifying feeling to creep up on him. However in this instance love, where it should have invigorated felt more like a slow setting concrete poured into this adventurers eager boots. So it was, that not even Cecile (the celestial—he had called her) with her diaphanous skin and near perfect breasts, no not even she could convince him to stay. “Au revoir Mamma, Pappa, goodbye sweet Cecile.” he cried, leaving them- all three- inconsolable at the departure gate. Vanishing out into the big wide world and never once looking back.

A life eater he titled himself. A globe-not trotter –for that is far too tame a stride– rather leaper, blundering intrepidly into the unknown. His quest not just for the continents but for their tribes of women. His noble and over-riding goal: to unite the nations under a single sleeping bag. True to his motto, his French Ce la vie, the one that simply stated: life is for living, the loins for giving.

And so if gobbling life meant a little over indulgence, a spot of indigestion here and there- so be it. Consummate in exploiting his many attributes: rugged charm, handsomeness, and when courtship might require it- trademark French indifference. Almost fluent in several languages, he had devoted himself to mastering one in particular, that spoken with the eyes. Furtive glances: expectant, hungry, hopeful and playful. Looks, which despite their degrees of suggestion offered invitations of an unequivocal kind. With these he lured each fluttering heart to his net, his hammock, bunk or bed and if they happened to linger too long, talk in a collective future tense, he would flee, promptly resume his life as itinerant rouge. It was not that he prided himself in leaving a universal trail of dejected hearts, just that he had grown accustomed to a self-absorbed ethos of the solo traveller: a constitution that never included notions of compromise and commitment. He recognized this as weakness, preferred not to dwell on it, and for most of his twenty years abroad, filling his eyes with impossible wonder, never really had to.

To finance his travels he took odd jobs in translation, everything from Spanish bibles to Swedish porn films. His athleticism and bilingualism allowing him to eventually find employment out in the world´s wildernesses as an adventure guide. Here he received qualifications in deep sea diving, mountain biking, high altitude mountain climbing and river rafting. His job generally involving lugging disinterested (and often decrepit) Europeans about on rather tame adventure excursions.

However after viewing his client’s family photos (which most of them carried in wallets) he’d invite them to send their ´just out of high school´ daughters to take a private tour. So endearing and trustworthy had he proven that they mostly agreed and from such generosity, one might say, he profited in more ways than one.

The girls were generally rich, naive and ravishingly beautiful. More crucially they arrived with a return air ticket. As for the ones that lacked the necessary aesthetics (those whose photographs proved to have been deceptive indications). Well, provided the evening camp fires were burning at a low smoulder (and he was drunk enough) he’d slip into their sleeping bags, warmth, not to mention the end of trip tip, the over-riding necessity at such frigid Andean altitudes.

Of course interspersed amongst his many sexual conquests were the untouched utopias of the world: the ample ruins, lost civilizations, the breathtaking vistas, underwater wonderlands. The luckiest man alive (he would be forgiven for thinking) A life eater, one who has well and truly chewed it up and spat it out. Never sated, still hungry for more.

By the time he had reached forty he had taken a six month contract with a Chilean adventure company, guiding the three- day jeep tour from San Pedro De Attacama across the Bolivian Salt Plateaus. It was while making a return trip to Chile (the first time he had undertaken such a trip alone) that his jeep had unexpectedly spluttered to a halt. With no radio or cell phone reception he was forced to sit it out and flag down the next passing vehicle.

 Surely time like this a blessing, time away from the incessant gabble of tourists. A moment of solitude amidst such a wonder should be savoured not willed away. The first rains of summer had fallen and now the pans 12,000 km circumference held a thin veil of water. At once a featureless salt desert transformed into vast reflective mirror. Earth merging with sky and rendering the horizon non-existent.

Now that he thinks of it, the arrival of forty has come as something of a shock, as has the sight of his reflection in the water. The first indication of grey hairs, fuzz on his ears similar to his fathers. Years of beer soaked abandon accumulated in a well cultivated paunch. On the seventh hour, the perspective (or lack of) begins to confound him. The heat beating down from above and burning up from below. He feels the niggle of emptiness, an increase of thirst. Left with only memory, topsy- turvy reflection to turn to, he tries to recall the past twenty years, searching for an internal island, a raft or refuge of some sort to cling to.

Places, faces (never names) fly through his cluttered head. Ears lobes, hairlines, ankles, belly rings, breasts and Brazilian waxes. Pieces sewn haphazardly together, merging now into an obscure and monstrous whole. A Spanish girl, name unknown (underage),buckets of sangria, cupids catalyst. Su or Lu or Wu the elastic band from Japan (or was it Malaysia?). That doe eyed Israeli girl, The Moroccan switch board operator, Russian dive instructor, Swiss anthropologist, retired Venezuelan beauty queen, spoilt trust fund Californian, Dutch. Italian, Romanian Air Hostesses. The Polish Ambassadors wife, a just engaged Argentinean and recently widowed South African. So it went on and on and on. Useless and empty the lot of them. Then at last, Cecile amidst the crowd, Cecile the celestial, the diaphanous. A burning mirage. At last a memory (albeit distant) to outlast the tug of testicles, the ephemeral ecstasies common to the multitude of others. He wonders where she might be in the world, wonders whose side she sleeps beside, the names of her children.

 Repent, the life eater must and does, wishing now he could vomit it all out- all those hastily torn, badly chewed chunks. Out here, where reflection stirs reflection, where salt meets salt. Doubled over the beat out bonnet of a Toyota Jeep- the luckiest man alive, wailing like a new born baby, confesses to being the saddest fucker to have ever crawled the face of the salty earth.

“She’s dead”, wails Elaine into the telephone
“What?” replies Catherine, all mock shock and horror
“Rosy,” she blubs uncontrollably, ‘Rosy’
“Dead?”
“Yes” her mother sobs “dead, dead, dead.’

Though she pretends to be, Catherine is hardly surprised at the news. Sadly she has anticipated or rather dreaded a call of this nature for some time. If anything, she is amazed it has taken so long. What chance did the poor creature have beneath her mothers suffocating wing? She is all too aware that such forms of kindness though carried out with the best of intentions are just another form of thinly disguised obsession- love suffused with paranoia. Recently Catherine has come to the understanding that each successive generation of a family is akin to a marathon runner, forwarding a baton grasped and passed down by the sweaty palm of history. That we are all somehow selected as haulers of our ancestor’s luggage, is something her sister Linda can confirm only she wryly suggests the replacement of the word ‘luggage’ with the more cumbersome synonym ‘baggage’. Both Catherine and Linda can remember their grandmother Olive as an even more harrowed version of their mother. An eighty -three year old who used to watch over them both with an oppressive intensity. It was only in later years that they discovered Granny Olive first child had drowned in a swimming pool which went a long way in explaining her obsession with filling family swimming pools with concrete and never permitting her grandchildren to leave the asylum of their padded play rooms.

Elaine is now a retired radio actress. The collapse of Springbok Radio years back has left her destitute, seeking solace in the act and art of useless recollection. Here the glory days are recalled in their every excruciating detail. Incited by a few glassed of wine at dinner parties, Elaine had been known to clear whole rooms with her laborious reminiscing. Now all that remains is a shelf of rusty awards, some stretched cassette tapes and an ailing memory through which to recall them. The cat used to help her to forget, the cat used to momentarily distract her from the trappings of such debilitating nostalgia. Now that the cat had gone, her daughters understandably fear the worst.

On hanging up the phone to her mother, Catherine is thankful it is the cat’s life and not hers; she has made it out alive. The lucky one then, her late father’s (an accountants) child: rational, practical, uncomplicated. One might call Catherine colorless and dour for the legacy of her father’s placidity but she does not mind, no rather she remains extremely grateful. Her elder sister Linda has survived the ordeal that is their upbringing less scathed. One might say that biology has dealt her the cruel hand: the inheritance of her mother’s unstable and loose fitting genes. Upon leaving high school she has subsequently lead a life of rebellion and defiance: flunking varsity, dabbling in narcotics and finally, much to the horror of her mother, falling pregnant with her Tantric instructor’s child. Linda’s current hard forged equanimity comes in the form of new age therapy (Elaine the centre of her visualizations, as the bull’s eye might be to the dart board.) Linda finds solace in these alternative forms of healing: ritual cleansing, moon dancing, crystal rubbing. Sordid sounding acts of redemption as her mother once called them ‘The type of phyco- cults that end up with everyone having sex in Teepees.’

Still Elaine can’t contain her curiosity, her meddling, she must investigate, pry- she must attend one of these weekend therapy sessions to know for sure. Linda agrees, reluctantly at first -She prefers the absolute minimum of contact with her mother but later she comes to embrace the idea: its high time mother and daughter confront their demons out in the wilderness.

So together they head off to Hermanus. Things go well on the first day. Elaine appears relaxed, partakes in the discussions, gathers sacred eagle fathers, even joins in the group hug. Linda is pleasantly surprised, briefly wonders whether her mother has achieved the impossible, mellowed out in her old age. The evening is less of a success. Elaine is taking a shower when the team leader Chris enters and begins showering alongside her. Of course Linda has conveniently failed to mention that the weekend involves bouts of communal showering. Elaine has not been naked in the presence of a man for over twenty years, she is horrified. While the man chats nonchalantly she makes every possible effort to conceal her breasts. Her heaps of withered exposed flesh.

“So how you finding the course Mrs T?” he asks sweetly
‘Oh fine,’ she stammers, ‘just fine’
Now eyeballing the ablution exit, the man smiling back at her with one hand innocently soaping his groin. She doesn’t know where to put her eyes, thanks god shampoo is running into them. She gropes for the nearest towel, gropes the man by mistake. The rest of the evening is spent horizontal back in the tent ,hyper ventilating. She refuses to elaborate to Elaine of the horror that was the shower. She packs her bags, leaving at first light, her suspicions confirmed.

Now back home in Durban, with her two daughters flown or rather fled to Cape Town from the nest, Elaine is left with only the cat to torment. Ever since her husbands passing she has threatened to relocate, a suggestion to which both Linda and Catherine have unanimously but politely vetoed. Catherine (the laat lametjie) and last to take the long walk to freedom, leaves her mother a farewell gift upon her departure- a sacrifice. A cat to ease the attentions, the intrusions she will attempt to wreak upon their adult lives. It has helped, a little. Though she still phones twice a day, at least now the conversation revolves around the ailing feline rather than interrogations into her and her sister’s private lives.

But now that the cat is no dead, what now? Linda suggests an Iguana as she’s heard they live forever. But she just as promptly retracts her comment claiming that nothing, not even the resilience of Iguanas’ might outlast their mother’s insufferable affections. Both sisters’ fear the worst. Now that their mother has poisoned the cat’s system with antibiotics it did not need, fed it more then it could hope to digest: Woolies ostrich meat, fresh tuna, full cream milk. Yes it was kindness but kindness tainted by cunning. ‘Immobility,’ quips Linda ‘her way of ensuring captivity.’ They can do nothing but empathise, with the cat rather than their mother. A majority of their childhood had been spent in doctors’ waiting rooms; grazed knees the cause for comprehensive X- rays. They were the only children in school to have never missed a day, sadly not out of choice but necessity. Rather hide their measles, cough discreetly into pillows, then arouse the attention of their mothers hyper reactive imagination.

For the cat it has been no different: each fatty lump- a burgeoning tumor, each meow - a cry of agony. Till eventually it had relented and turned belly up. Linda claims it was suicide, after all what chance did the poor thing stand? It couldn’t just get on a plane to Cape Town, screen phone calls- this was its only way out. The vet however rather considerately cites old age as the cause but Elaine is not so easily duped: the cat was barley three years old! Dissatisfied she decides she must get the bottom of it, scour the internet for alternative explanations eventually settling on a website that subscribes a rare human disease, passed from owner to animal. Now she must prove that she is the carrier, the culprit- the cat killer. She wracks up exorbitant medical bills going for tests. Second, third, forth opinions all arrive with the same answer: No, she does not carry the disease, the disease is in fact a cyber space speculation to which there is no founding medical basis.

Once again she turns her torment toward the long suffering Veterinarian
‘I want to know,” she demands “I want to know what killed my Rosy, and don’t give me that old age nonsense”.
He is apprehensive. He has had the misfortune of dealing with a grieving Mrs Thomas before. The last time however involved a manic depressive parakeet, the same parakeet which Rosy, the cat had promptly put out of its misery by devouring.
He fidgets with his pen.
“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea Mrs Thomas” he assures her, but she persists
‘I can handle it, help me to put her to rest for once and for all”
A nervous silence ensues, he clears his throat.
“It was a break down.’
‘I beg your pardon’ says Elaine, hand pressed to heart, her face the perfect portrait of despair.
‘Your Rosy died of a nervous breakdown Mrs Thomas.”

Naturally she is distraught, devastated. So much so that the vet and his assistant have to carry her to her car. Bed ridden, breaking out in cold sweats, intoxicated with grief, Elaine resolves to fill her days with ‘woe is me’ weeping, self flagellation. Adorn her walls with the felines portrait. Gold plaques: In loving memory of. She will let the guilt manifest, knot, rot at her from the inside. ‘I will die in bed’ she concedes, ‘Yes die of a heavy broken heart.’

Weeks pass, numb on mypradol, she passes the days watching damp stains forming on the ceiling. Until a revelation, sign- If anything that dreaded weekend away in Hermanus was useful in learning how to identify these cosmic indicators. She has read ‘The Alchemist’ under Linda’s recommendations, she has learnt all about omens and their significance. She must turn this into a positive, yes a positive, interpret Rosy’s untimely passing to be a cryptic blessing. She must pack up her bags, her life, book a ticket- relocate to Cape Town. Old age better spent in the company of her needy daughters.

I noticed him huddled amongst the harbor masters and hussies in a down town bar. I don’t recall seeing a sadder more dejected looking fellow. What with that crumpled hat pulled over ears, a newspaper Rollie dangling despondently from lips. Sitting there conversing with an empty bar stool in-between sipping on a triple. Ubiquitous to down town Durban, most would dismiss him as run of the mill street loony. Brain decayed by cheap spirits, the type you encountered either cursing reflections in shop windows or raving against the tides of on coming traffic.

But this man was different, different for the Accordion that hung from his neck. I was fortunate enough to discover their music, when in a fit of divine and drunken inspiration he launched into an impromptu session of Accordion blues. It was a set he had lovingly dedicated to that same vacant bar stool. A set that left his brow sopping, finger tips bleeding and us -the unsuspecting bar stragglers- inconsolable with our gin soaked weeping.

To say his music had an effect on whom ever heard it, would be to underestimate his gift all together. To listen to him play was to have ones sadness, ones silt simultaneously dredged to the surface. An experience that lead me to consider, that this man, most commonly dismissed as mere deranged mortal, might in fact be the closest thing our city had to covert angel.

I never forgot that night, the man, his music. A few weeks later, upon leaving a wharf side restaurant, I heard his Accordion again, this time like a stowaway rat in search of a piper followed its strains to find him crouched amongst the Veggies pier fishermen. They invited me to stay a while, to sip from their communal bottle, which I did, taking a few generous sips before attempting to strike up a conversation with the man. There are many things I hoped to discover. Such as: what had bought this poet, this sentimental loon to haunt the cities streets and shore lines with his music? Was it Booze, bankruptcy or heart break? And who was it that sat beside him on that bar stool Synonymously laconic in his responses (god knows how many journalists had tried and failed to extract the myth from downtrodden maestro), he sat for a while eyeing me skeptically through the cloud of cigarette smoke that spouted from his lips. Then finally he rose to his feet and threw open his arms, exclaiming: For her, for her’. The fishermen laughed as I strained my eyes in all directions, eventually allowing them to settle on object of his immeasurable affection- the twinkling Cityscape, toes skirting the water’s edge, clad in her skimpy nightgown of salt and humidity.

Then he picked up his accordion and began to play a slow bluesy tune, shuffling on the spot while he spoke. He told me how during the day he’d let her relish in her reputation as the city where the fun never sets, but come night he’d devote himself to loving her shadows, nursing her bruises- the faithful guardian who, wouldn’t, couldn’t forget. Once her suitors had satisfied their lusts, retired to their hotel beds, it was up to him to repair her broken heel, pull out a bar stool and buy her a drink. Then sing to her, sing her and her children to sleep.

‘Children?’ I had enquired.

‘Too many to name …without a name’ he had sighed impatiently . ‘The ones that haunt the East coast avenues, feed from restaurant bins, pawning their paradises from traffic islands. The one’s who follow her,-begging, tugging at her breasts and tearing at her hair.’

‘That quite a relationship you’ve gotten yourself into.’ I smiled, but he failed to find anything humorous about his commitment/ predicament. To laugh at him was to deny her existence, the veracity of their love-an unforgivable insult. Best accept his flights of unhinged whimsy as fact, relinquish all reason and succumb to a world, where it were perfectly possible (and not in the least bit unusual) for whole cities to seduce men. Even the fishermen seemed to accept his fantastical delusions with an unwavering conviction. They spoke of her ability to withhold the annual sardine run and therefore encouraged him to appease her with his music. Whether they truly believed this or not I couldn’t quite discern, but I got the impression that they were careful to renounce superstition in instances where their livelihoods might depend on it.

It was a love, the Accordion man went on to assure me that she reciprocated. Once she had discovered that he spent his days’ combing the Golden Mile beaches with a metal detector, she had conspired to assist him. She did this by concealing the wedding rings of careless weekenders in her sandy pockets. Rings disengaged from life long commitments to fingers, shallow enough for his metal detector to detect. Only once he had collected enough of these tokens, would he trade them in at Point Road cash converter. Such was his disenchantment toward love, at least the type that insisted on the insecure affirmation of golden bands, that he felt no guilt for the weeping brides clawing up the beaches in bids to retrieve them. This was how he claimed to provide for them both, foot the nightly bar bill, and perhaps more importantly save up to purchase the Instrument, I now watched heaving and wheezing between his bony fingers.

That night I stayed on after the Accordion Man had embarked on his nightly vigil, entreating the fishermen to fill me in on what sketchy details they knew of him. They spoke of how he had relinquished a life in the suburbs, a burgeoning blues career on the world’s stages, to be with her. How over the passing months, they had watched him drink his spirit dry, satchel her sadness, shoulder each and every one of her hungry orphans.

‘I worry about him,’ said one of the fishermen, piercing a hook through the mouth of a wriggling shad, before casting it back into the water.

‘She’s a jealous Stekkie, that Missus Thekweni. Each night we watch him sinking deeper and deeper.’

‘In love?’ I had asked but they had shook their heads in mutual disagreement

‘Sadness my bra, sadness.’

The Accordion Man however seemed stoic to his burden. Over the years, he could be heard (seldom seen, for he favoured the shadows) weaving his melancholic tunes through derelict shelters, rusted South Beach playgrounds, Point Road alley’s shrouded in lugubrious neon. His music offering glimpses of respite to the anguished souls sleeping in funeral home doorways, crutched on Addington Hospital benches or peeping from beneath cardboard shelters.

Inevitably, he’d end his evenings’ efforts’ back where he had started- the harbor’s edge. It was here, that he told me, that his love would reward him by mobilizing herself into a languid, mesmeric dance. Her machinery waltzing, yacht sails rippling, floating cities defiant of tug boat dictatorships breaking free to greet him. When he spoke of such occasions, his lips would spread with the first discernable traces of a smile, his down cast eyes flickering with wild childlike intensity.

It was silence that marked his disappearance, silence that swiftly set about reclaiming his nightly routes and haunts. An unsettling quiet that led me to scour the alleys, the piers, the dingy point road bars’, but to no avail. The following day’s newspaper headlines mourned the absence of the annual sardine run while on the sixth page of that same paper, I came across a small paragraph claiming that a harbor master had witnessed a lone figure, wading out into the rising tide in the early hours of Monday morning. A body that was later recovered and identified for the Accordion that clung to its neck.

I wept to think that this terse, unimaginative paragraph of news print was to provide the epilogue to my friends richly imagined and tragically lived fable. Suicide they suspected and we must forgive them for thinking so. I cannot help but see it differently, believing it was ‘sacrifice’ that led him weary and lovesick to the edge of that moonlit expanse. That it was she who had summoned him. Summoned him in salt whispers to seek out her arms from the loneliness of his shore. Beckoned him by hiking the tide of her skirt high above her knees, revealing both wasteland and wonderland-inky puddles that inverted her horizon into portholes to alternate universes. And him ,no doubt enthralled by her beauty while underestimating the portability of her pain (a pain manageable beneath concrete and stone but out here on this tentative marshy surface- less so) had set out to meet her.

With each irrevocable step, each sad note, he had sunk deeper and deeper into her arms. The silt rising to silence his Accordion lung, fasten tight that selfless singing tongue. Leaving the crumpled hat of a saint with no name- the final keepsake for her tides to claim.

Roll Up For the Magical Mystery Tour

A letter for Jill on her Departure

John Lennon sits on the edge of her bed, his wings folded neatly behind his back…any requests tonight Jilly? …. How about ‘Hey Jude’ she replies. So he plays ‘Hey Jude’ and when he finishes, he leans the guitar against the bed and then runs his fingers through her hair – then whispers ‘Roll up Jilly, Roll up for the Magical Mystery Tour, its coming to take you away’ , she smiles a toothless smile (they’re in the little yellow tub beside her bed) She wished that when John visited that she would at least remember to put her teeth in, but the angel always seemed to visit at such unexpected hours that she could never quite be prepared.

Thandi (the nurse) bursts through the door- swaggering her prodigious behind, toast (peanut butter and Jam) and luke warm Riccoffee in hand. She’s come to serve breakfast and clean the ash tray from Jill’s long night of smoking. Biggles the dog follows close behind- aware that persistence is usually rewarded with breakfast scraps. Jill, confused, glances around the room but John has vanished. All that remains is a single feather from his wing (Others will tell her it’s just from the goose feather pillow on her bed, but she is old enough to not have to justify herself to anyone anymore). Thandi finds an empty ash tray , Jill doesn’t touch her toast , and Biggles goes un fed.

Bodies can be so god damn unreliable– and hers being the big cumbersome piece of machinery it was – had begun to close down, rust shut .The spirit grown impatient, a soul ready to leap free but trapped in its faulty old cage .She has been prepping for her release- Last night Ricky (her Toy Boy) from the U.K phoned to talk to her, In a state of delirium she held the phone to her ear. ‘Hold on Aunty Jill I’m on my way to see you, wait for me okay! But she replies …’oh I’m afraid I wont be here Ricky …..I’m going to China in the morning’

John has offered her tickets on the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ and what Beatle fanatic could ever turn down an opportunity like that. It appears the first stop might be China and well….. Who knows from there?

I helped her pack her bags- She always used to threaten Greg and I, as kids that if we didn’t stop fighting she would pack her bags and go back to Port Shepstone. Of course we continued to beat the shit out of each other – and Jill been the consummate actress she was, would fling her clothes into her old suitcase and pretend to leave the house in a rage…….That’s it …. I’m leaving! This would naturally reduce us both to fits of tears, and beg her to return….which (been the softie she was) she finally did.

This time, I’m twenty four years old and standing on the road trying to convince her to come back inside but I can’t make her stay. I can only sit with her in the bus stop of her bed room, hold her hand, and every now and then through a morphine haze, she opens her eyes and asks me to please stop crying.

Since Childhood our goodnight ritual went as follows – ‘ill see you later alligator’

And Jill would respond ‘In a while crocodile’ a mischievous twinkle in her misty blue eyes.

Last night I said ill see you later alligator Jilly? and she took my hand gently and shook her head. I knew then that Mr Lennon and the boys were heralding the final boarding call and that the Magical Mystery tour was only a few hours away from it’s auspicious departure.

It would be selfish of me to try delay this departure- Staying only means further suffering, I wouldn’t wish that for a second. But I want to make her coffee , just like I used to, stir in all the love and sugar I could heap onto two spoons- sweat and milky –coffee and cigarettes, sitting by her window and waiting for the Natal Robin to visit . Her secret omen. It arrived one day and she wept as I held her body up from the bed so she could see.

The memories prove relentless in times like this

I’m a new born baby, in the photograph, cradled in her mighty arms, tag around my wrist.

I’m a little boy in her bedroom, watching her dress for her shift at the Port Shepstone Hospital – rolling on her thick stockings, Shining her Sister Koll Badge, sliding pins through her thick grey hair. I’m remembering the latex surgical gloves she used to bring home so we could make ‘hand’ balloons from them. The damp smell of her old house down the coast –Parrot seeds, cigarette smoke and sea salt. I’m remembering Sheeba and his garage, (The one I hid in when Gorg’s fearsome Dutch friend ‘Mate’ came round for tea). The wild tangled South Coast garden, compost to the already fertile imagination of a six year old. Fresh water crabs the size of dogs. Tractor carcasses amongst the over ripe Popo trees

Nuzzling into her back for bed time stories. Floating in the swimming pool with her, her legs were buoyant here, painless and we floated through the summer evening stars together. Watching Floyd the boozy chef on TV, whilst earning extra pocket money by cutting her toenails

Her perchant for the mysterious, an insatiable appetite for all things Agatha Christie- Trips to the Library – her love of stories, reading, telling and creating them.

My campaign to ban smoking in our house by putting NO SMOKING signs all around her room and then even resorting to painting vinegar on the tips of her cigarettes in attempt to make her quit. Then as teenagers smuggling ciggies out of her room- Greg Lomas would distract and my nimble fingers would slip a few into the undies. Jill of course saw all, and been a sport, turned a blind eye. As they say if you can’t beat em , join em- and join her I did- eventually, only too happy to indulge with her in a few Styvie Blues and goblets of good old checkers box wine.

The last time I remember her dancing was with me, at my eighteenth birthday party. It was to her favorite song by Billy Holiday- the same song I always sang with her after that –even on the night of her departure, she could still find the strength to mouth the words.

Ill be seeing you, in all the old familiar places

That this heart of mine embraces

All day through

In that small café –the park across the way

The children’s carasole

The chestnut tree

The wishing well

Ill be seeing you

In every lovely summers day

In everything that’s light and gay

Ill always think of you that way

Ill find you in the morning sun

and when the night is noon

Ill be looking at the moon

But ill be seeing you

There were the dreams of Elephants and Dolphins –We were all in the bush together –sitting out on a verandah- the whole family –Jill in her wheel chair. Suddenly an Elephant tore through the foliage, hurtling towards us- we tried to wheel Jill inside but she begged us to leave her, which we did. The Elephant approached her- she sat unflinching until the venerable beast stopped in front of her – bowing its mighty head at her feet- at a distance where she could place her hand on the coarse patch between its eyes. We watched in awe as the animal then rose and Jill leapt from her wheel chair and began to dance, a wild youthful dance.

Then there was the dream where Jill and I were in a small little motor boat- Jill lying at the back, her one hand dipped languidly in the ocean- we were out on the Fish Hoek bay – a perfectly still and beautiful afternoon, the light golden on the waves- I drove the boat far out to where the sun was setting, and in our wake hundreds of Dolphins began to leap from the water, Jill and I filled with both laughter and tears.

Now the Cowies Hill morning rain breaks with patches of sun – The Monkeys Wedding is accompanied by an actual troop of monkeys –the ones that walk the tight rope on the neighbours Tennis court fence – Jill often watched them from her window-they provided her endless hours of amusement. Now they miss their audience member. The window that now frames an empty bed covered with rose petals.

 I can’t help but watching the baby monkeys leaping from branch to branch – discovering the possibilities, the agility and ability of their eager little limbs. I can’t help but thinking that Jill is leaping and dancing, kicking and Can Caning in a place where those very possibilities have now been restored to her.

So the Bus did arrive (I discovered a single feather on her bed this morning)– John had whispered ‘Roll up, Roll up for the magical Mystery Tour, its coming to take you away’ and roll up Jilly did. She once told me that, to die would be a great adventure- and at three thirty this morning –with a final hearty sigh –Jill boarded the bus and began her new adventure. No doubt Mr Lennon was at the wheel, passing around the joints. Natal Robins pecking at the glass on her window, Dolphins piercing the waves to welcome her, entire Elephant herds bowing to the ground and the spring flowers of Namaqualand bursting into a brilliant fragrant carpet of color – signaling the way to a glorious new and painless existence.

Today and forever I celebrate this extraordinary angel of a woman with you. Whose memory and spirit will long outlive the limitations of her tired body.

Her worst were the openings. Tim at the podium, reduced to an artist statement- a jumble of jargon, justification. Explanations he owed no one. Why them? Out of all people ‘the madding fucking crowd’ with their ignorant asides, sniggers. The cruelty of pedestrians, she thinks, going through life gazing at their shoes, congregating at gallery openings for nothing but the gratis cucumber sandwiches and box wine booze.

The obscurity of objects: whims that alienated most, delighted few. It would be different if they were in Amsterdam, New York but South Africa, Durban? This shitty gallery with shitty wine. He’s more than this, she’s sure he is. Years of watching him agonize over light, shadows, street lamps, telephone poles had offered her gradual access, a gentle initiation. He would make her pull the car over on holidays and she’d watch, initially bemused, later intrigued, as he set about photographing telephone poles from every conceivable angle. The way its chords hung out: ugly, austere things, lines sagging between. Only now, independent, strangely idiosyncratic. Till she began pointing them out off her own accord, stopping the vehicle before he had asked.

Perhaps you had to love him to love his art. She wouldn’t have had an inkling had she not shared his process, anxiety, bed. The evolution of an idea, momentary fragments, fleeting, ephemeral….. blah blah blah. Yet when he spoke it, the blah was oddly effecting, poetical even sensical. His reference- hers. Now it seemed there was no other way of seeing, that, that was frankly, how these things, things such as telephone poles, had always been.

She must not judge them. Must allow them their right to ignorance. She could have been one of them, perhaps secretly was still one of them. Walking brusquely past images that confronted her, challenged her, moving politely toward the prettier painting sections. Conceptual art or crawling up one’s own arse. People were dying, children starving and this, this was his response to the world- an unflinching commitment to the inanimate, to most- the mundane.

Was there room left in the world for such…such insignificance? Yes its’ insignificant but….. she’s tired of justifying it, sticking by it. A circular debate best left to that to the pontificating minds of conferencing academics. Another glass of dreadful wine, familiar smiles flashed from people she has no recollection of meeting. Exhausted by the pretence. Maybe he’s set himself up for this- splaying deconstructions, reconstructions …god whatever you call them, on gallery walls to tepid responses, the stirred interest of the elite few. He should have learnt the first time round. This is no way to make a living, not here: Amsterdam, New York perhaps but not here?

He could paint, was a fine painter, she wished he still painted. No, she wouldn’t suggest it again. He found such suggestions offensive. He had progressed, this was progression, progressive art. Progression: the curse of our times. Painting the primitive starting point to which there was no return. Still she wished he’d do one every now and then. A bowl of fruit, naked muse (she would even offer to pose) birdlife, something that appealed to the ascetic of the everyman, something her parents could respond to, something that didn’t make them feel stupid. His diversions only incited confusion, frustration. Good he would say: Art must illicit a response, discourse, vitriol, bring it on!

Still she feels the need to hide him, block his ears, conceal the work, take the bullets, at least turn up the music, drown out their irreverence. She mustn’t hear them, more importantly he mustn’t. He’ll turn their indifference into a triumph, he has the habit of doing that, shrugging them off, but skin, his skin is thin, at times transparent.

She watches from the bar, another glass of wine, something to busy the hands, occupy the lips. Tim flitting between conversations, the occasional ‘Save me from these Neanderthal’s’ glances thrown in her direction. They’ll celebrate him, she thinks. Celebrate him, perhaps when he’s dead, it’s always like that. Depressing, pointless business this art– obliteration before veneration– not now, later. Later they’ll pay exorbitant sums, cover their walls in telephone poles. Hypocrites- she’ll laugh at them, laugh if she’s still around to see it.

The barman smiles, slides her change over the counter. For a moment, perhaps a result of the low light, he resembles Ian, her brother. Scruffy old Ian, Ian now an ecologist on assignment in Brazil. Ian who learnt the Newman’s Bird book before bed, made them stop every few minutes on family excursions to Kruger Park. She hadn’t minded the raptors or hornbills, the ones she could name, the ones blessed with grace and plumage, the pretty ones. But the ones her brother called the LBJ’s (little brown jobs) those were the ones that annoyed her the most. The ones whose identification he had obsessed over, lining them up in his binocs, whisking through pages and pages of finches. ‘Finches- shit with wings’ her dad had joked. But to her this wasn’t amusing it was sabotage. Ian was testing the limits of their patience, his parents love, worst of all interfering with their joint conquest at ticking off the big five before sunset.

But it was because of their indiscernible differences (at least to the amateur, the sight seer) that they offered the only real test left to her brother-the aficionado. A boy who had conquered the raptors, kites and kingfishers, could spot them a mile off. But those, those fucking finches, drab skittish things with wings, those were the only ones left- the greatest challenge of them all.