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.

Wendy stepped from out of the change rooms, usually reserved for sweaty sportsman, to meet a coliseum of twenty thousand followers. Upon her entrance some proceeded to cry out her name, flailing arms in a ‘holy sprit’ fuelled frenzy. Other’s blew horns, slugged beer, participated in half-arsed Mexican waves. Then Wendy did what she had come to do, the only thing she knew how to do. As the crowd grew silent, she laid a square of plastic at her feet and began to weep.

It was less than a year ago that she had been discovered in a primary-school talent show. The other kids had juggled and dropped balls, bribed pet poodles through hula hoops, attempted two key recorder recitals. Wendy however possessed no such talents, she was different and different is what the talent scout, scouring the joint for a ‘Shirley Temple’ like act to exploit in cereal commercials, had come looking for.

For a moment the girl stood before the curtain, stunned by the interrogatory spot light, below her a restless expanse of bobbing heads, rustling sweet papers, cleared throats. Then came the first tear, prompting gasps from the audience as it chartered a path down her cheek. Tears that began as a furtive trickle soon turned to a torrent. Tears that washed the stage floor clean and saturated the shoes of people sitting in the front row.

That night Wendy cried for the simple things that made her sad. She cried for: grazed knees, boiled eggs, for the blind, the deaf, people with amputated legs (She cried at the thought of their lonely cob webbed shoe). She cried for canned laughter, canned tuna and the dolphins that suffered to make it, for the rain forests that lay rotting in waste paper bins. She cried for her parents, now sitting on opposite ends of the hall, dreaming from separate beds. For the hunters, the hunted, her uncle’s wall- trophied with Bambi and his entire families heads. She cried from fear, frustration, for the future and for the past. She cried for the living, the dead- The living-dead, the ghosts she heard pacing in the attic each night. She cried for hobos, the dodo and for onions cause no one ever really did.

The audience, unburdened by the sudden catharsis, rose to their feet applauding and the talent scout, amazed at the lightness restored to his own heavy heart, promptly signed up the child to weep under contract: private functions, shopping centre openings, political rallies, funerals, inaugurations and benefit concerts.

Over the following months, Wendy wept for the homeless, the hapless, the headlines (lampposts crippled with god- awful news). For road kill and road rage, sickness, injustice. For war, false promises, pollution, politicians, prostitutes, priests, black eyes, bruised fists, abortions, overdoses, slit-wrists, smoking guns, veiled daughters and soldiered sons. For countries, continents she knew nothing of. She wept with the collective grief of orphanages. Cried for the suppressed, repressed, destitute, depressed, starving babies, empty breasts, the forgotten, misunderstood, the old, the lost, the tired, liars, losers, beggars, children and their abusers.

It wasn’t long before TV execs, offered her a prime-time Sunday slot where viewers could call in and dedicate the weeper’s tears to whomever they wished. Here Wendy found herself weeping for (amongst others) the rich, the greedy, the displaced, the needy, for people who think too little and the ones who think too much, for circus clowns, comedians, celebrity cellulite,midgets with super model aspirations, for lonely rock stars, dowdy check out girls, people cooped up all day in parking ticket booths. For abandoned things, stopped watches, car boot sales, pawn shop engagement rings.

And when she thought she had finally emptied herself of all tears (for entire oceans do not lie at one’s eye ducts disposal) the Talent Scout announced that she was contracted to fulfil a final obligation.

‘Please sir’ she begged ‘I’m tired of being sad ,I have no more tears left to cry, let me turn my heart to lead. I want to be like the other children, I’ll learn to play the recorder instead.’

‘We had an agreement,’ scoffed the agent, pawing a pile of coffee stained papers strewn about his desk. ‘I’m afraid you don’t have much of a say. Your tears don’t belong to you now, not since your greedy parents singed them away.’

And so standing reluctantly in front of her twenty- thousand fans, Wendy could think of nothing to weep for now, except their collective emptiness.

‘Take it, take it, take all of it’ they seemed to say, thrusting hands as if tossing bundles. Pissing, purging into her as if she were an open latrine, an empty well, now full. Knees buckled as twenty thousand tears trickled from her edges, tearing at her eyes, salt rinsing blood. And as they removed her body from the field (with the same amount of care one takes when discarding a soggy Kleenex) two solemn faced men in black-suits proceeded to display the plastic sheet of shed tears for the audience to first inspect then applaud. That evening the droves returning home sufficiently lighter then when they first arrived.

 

From a road side stall-midnight-

I see my destiny reflected in a cold cuppa chai

You’ve been given the wings Frankie (I mutter to myself….prophetically …..pathetically)

It’s time Kiddo for you ta fly!

Now it seems, that dreams

can make a sane man do desperate things

‘Whats it all worth? Eh fuck it’ (I mutter)

and quickly collect my things

Thumb a ride

with a Punjabi Truck Driver

who swings open the door and utters

‘Well Sah, what you waiting for

Why don’t cha hop inside?’

‘Which way ya heading?’ …. the driver enquires

as I sip casually on a cigarette

(inhale)ahh to the land of all my dreams

(exhale) to quench the thirst of all desires

He turns the Key

ahhhhhhh Mumbai, that’s a little outta your neighborhood!

I nod

The engine roars

and soon were shooting through the veins of Bollywood

Rushing through the electric chaos

Touching the interminable void

Sipping on sweet cocktails

of sin and celluloid

Bright light -skin tight -thug fight

Hold on tight….

(This might shake you up a little)

I only got twenty bucks in my pocket

but already I’m soaring like a rocket

Through the stars-to become one

never looking back

Bought me a fancy second hand suit for a few dirty Rupees

Act like I care

Brylcream my hair

I’m a super star now

No longer the groupie!

Waiting -with midnight cowboy cool-

under this Mumbai street lamp

Feeling all swanky

though I smell like a tramp…

But I don’t give a shit

Cause just you wait till I hit

bolding like a giant across them movie screens

took my own advice

rolled the knowing dice

Now I can’t turn my back

on my Bombay dreams

No I can’t turn my back

on my Bombay dreams

But cars (as they do) come and go

with no money men

or eager agents

coughing up the contracts

let alone da dough

No dream makers

Only dream takers

Celebrity fakers -like myself

Lining up with the whores along the sticky Bombay boulevard

Residing in the lost

….never found

Here no one asks me ta do my Pacino..

…Hoffman?

…my Deniro ?

I can play the all singing, all dancing lover boy

I can be your Chandelier dangling hero

But they brush past this future Bogart

nonchalantly slouched out on the street

Then an old lady takes some pity

You poor sad thing! she says

and tosses a few rupees at my feet

The sun sinks down

as the coins tinkle on the ground

and another star crashes and burns on this lonely Bombay sidewalk

like a cigarette-stumped-

-gone out-

but still smokin

and this ‘wanna be’-'look at me’-'Just you wait an see!’

calls it a night

and finally packs his hope in

Turning his back on his Bollywood dreams

Turning his back on his Bollywood dreams

I slowly and sadly fold away my pair of wings

What’s it all worth? Eh fuck it (I mutter)

and quickly collect my things

Thumb a ride

With a Punjabi Truck driver

Who swings open the door and utters

‘Well sah what cha waiting for

Why don’t you hop inside?’

‘Which way you heading ,Sah?’

The driver beams

but I tell him there’s been a little change a plan

I’m going in search of new pair of dreams

How I didn’t find fame

Only shame

On those streets of Bollywood.

but take heart to know

There’s a lamp post and a second hand suit

waiting for me down in ol Hollywood.

Circles for so long

After the wake, after the last drunken mourner has left, I make my way to my grandmother’s room. Candle wicks burn in wax puddles at her bedside, the rose petals that were scattered on her bed at the beginning of the week, have dried, stabilizing the stale scent of her last cigarette with the fragrance of fresh pot pouri.

A box of her ashes rests at the centre of the bed, I curl around it, bury my nose deep into her pillow, inhaling her freshly shampooed hair (Colgate Apple). The mattress has in it, an impression of her cumbersome body .On either side, shallow curves where her baggy arms had hung. I sink into her cushioned negative, the shadow of a life that is no longer. The vacancy of the room, the radio turned off (in all her life the radio was never turned off) makes me cry.

The silver linings of empty cigarette boxes catch the candle light. Cigarette boxes with morphine induced scribbling’s across the backs of them. In her last weeks she had quite fancied herself to be an answering machine for the dead. Uncles and relatives long past had appeared to her, sat on the edge of her bed, some had sipped wine, others had massaged her aching legs with arnica. The ghost’s, always left with the confidence that their greetings would be conveyed to the living, and sure enough they were.

“What’s the matter Neilo?” I sit up, follow the familiar voice to my grandfather’s old blue chair in the corner of the room. The last of the candles has extinguished itself making the figure hard to discern. Only the orange glow of a freshly lit cigarette offers some assistance, revealing, with each steady pull, the distinctive lines of my grandmother’s face-younger, calmer, unembroidered by the anguished creases of the past months.

This is the reunion, she had promised me before her departure. Jill believed firmly in the mystical, the supernatural, swore she would employ it as a means for our ongoing communication. She never made promises lightly

‘That was a hell of a party’ she chuckles, lifting a glass of white wine to her lips.

‘Yip’ I nod, my clothes still sopping from the funeral parties final frenzied dance into the swimming pool. I wipe the tears from my cheeks; brush my fingers over the inscribed gold plaque, following the gentle cursive brail of her name- Jill Rosalind Koll.

‘Why do you look so sad Neilo?’ she asks

‘I was just thinking how strange it is to see someone so big, fitting into such a small little box’ I reply

She draws deep on the cigarette, heaves a gentle sigh that sends smoke rushing in alternate streams from her nostrils. ‘You think after all those years, I’d rest easy in that little tin box, not me Neilo! That clunky old contraption of a body maybe, a prison of blood and bone that’s all it was, but me, I’m free now, I have years of dancing to catch up on’

‘Do you remember the last time we danced?’ I ask , half expecting her to have forgotten

‘Your eighteenth birthday’ she quips, both of us taken aback by the speed and accuracy of her recollection.

‘On the patio, to Billy Holiday, we had had a lot of wine, you played our song. That night, I expended the last dance I had left in those useless old legs ’

I remember it well, the wine and music had managed to inspire in them a final courageous shuffle. She had discarded her walking stick, clung to my shoulders and shifted uncomfortably side to side, rasping the words into my ear ……

‘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 done, Ill be looking at the moon, But ill be seeing you’……

I curl, fetal to face the empty fish bowl beside her bed- it’s pebble’s green with neglect. ‘Agatha Christy’ novels and the ‘History channel’ had failed to distract her from the excruciating pain of the final months and so I had brought her a Chinese fighter fish in the hope that it might provide a novel diversion. It seemed to work for a while. After witnessing the ‘fighters’ infatuation with his more ‘magnificent and magnified’ reflection in her bedside shaving mirror, Jill had named him Narcissus. Apt, for there had never had there been a more self- absorbed fish, consistently rapt in the fawning over and flaring out of his fiery crimson tail.

Sadly ‘Narcissus’ took a week to turn belly up, and in a spectacle, true to all dying kabuki Warriors (who enact their deaths in flailing red silk) sunk to the bottom of his bowl. I found Jill crying that day, convinced the fish had suffocated from a lack of oxygen, oxygen she blamed herself for having plundered from the air through her incessant chain smoking. I tried to excuse Narcissus’s untimely demise as a ‘kamikaze’ tendency typical to all fighter fishes of an Eastern origin, then reverted the blame to Thandi, (her gargantuan arsed nurse) for over feeding him. Jill was less convinced. ‘It was boredom’ she had finally remarked …. ‘A beautiful fish like that can only swim circles for so long’

I turn to her ghost, nestled in the shadows of the room, screwing the remains of her ciggie into the ‘Dunlop tyre’ ash tray.

‘I thought I’d find you in you in this bed, that’s why I been lying here the past few evenings, to be closer to you’

She smiles again, shaking her head ‘ Oh believe me, there’s no love lost between me and that old bed’ I spent enough years in it, staring up at the ceiling, watching the geckos stalk moths till the early hours of the morning. ‘But look now’ she says whispering excitedly ‘Look Neilo!’

With perfect grace and steadiness, she rises out of the chair, knees pulling tight, thighs sturdy and strong. She hikes up her skirt up to reveal silky stockings nursing plump calves. Gone are the withered twigs she departed with, shins gnawed by time and pain. She smiles, a familiar twinkle in her o’l misty blue eye, ‘I changed them for a dancing pair… A fish can only swim circles for so long’.

At 5’oclock Mrs Webb was woken by the first signs of dawn flapping in the curtain. She rose quickly, taking a moment to rub arnica on her knees, fiddling with the knob on her bedside radio to locate the classical radio station- one of Chopin’s prelude’s were playing , minor or major she could not decide. She would remember to ask Dorothy Jennings over tea, Dorothy would be able to name it off a hum. She would not forget it.

While relieving herself in the bathroom Mrs Webb watched her false teeth grinning from a glass perched on the sink. Once she had secured fixed them in place she took a moment to scrutinise her reflection. She had been beautiful, had spent enough hours in her lazy chair flipping though photographs of her youth, to be certain of this. Now she searched for a semblance of that face - that girl- her existence indiscernible, retreated into a heap of wrinkles and wobbly chin skin. She mulled over the passing of time- her twenties (bliss) forties (surprise) sixties- (shock) and now seventy fifth? What now? ‘The years’ Mrs Webb muttered; ‘surreptitious little devils, creeping up on one when they least expected.’

Mrs Webb had her day carefully planned, birthdays involved accommodating more people then she was used to. She would swim at six, take tea at twelve, birthday lunch with her grandson at one and afternoon tea (to squeeze in her sister) at two. Should all the engagements run according to plan, she would be nestled in bed by half six. Only this morning she felt despondent- the sight of her tired face, the groan in her knees, aching back enough to make her reconsider facing the day at all.

 Morning’s were an open invitation to the deficiencies of age, things always seemed to get better as the day progressed. She must keep that in mind, must not be defeated, she must select a dress from the closet and finalize her decision over what jam she would settle for on her tea time scones. Strawberry or apricot? apricot or strawberry? Small things, trivial things that helped take one’s mind off the more pressing concerns.

Mrs Webb had read in her Readers Digest that specialists recommended the elderly keep their eyes and minds active by reading. She now read for twenty minutes each morning- usually a random passage from the Bible. While not particularly religious she had turned to the scriptures in preparation for the things one should start preparing for at her age. After a few psalms she felt suitably reassured, enough to unpeg her damp bathing suit and matching cap from the line and make her way across the railway track to the beach where the old age swimming club was out in full alacrity. Some waved, wishing her a good morning. The few, in possession of sound memory, added a happy birthday to the end of their greetings. Lil Morrison and Ethel Lewis were on the beach, watching their doddery old husbands breast stroking beyond the breakers, their conversation concerning ,rather predictably, the majesty of the morning (“Breathtaking isn’t it Lil!”) the water temperature (“Summer’s on its way, hey Ethel”) and wave conditions (“Still as a pond, not a ripple”). Mrs Webb, in no mood to feign perkiness issued a polite wave as she scuttled past. “Happy Birthday” Ethel shouted after her, followed by Lil “Happy Birthday old girl”. She would not compromise, not today- for it was through solitude that she hoped to forge some sort of a reconciliation with the first morning of her seventy fifth year.

Standing, with water circling her waist, Chopin still lingering in her ears, Mrs Webb took in the sight: the mountains stretched across the horizon, crisp and clear as the day they had been created. She turned on her back and let the water relieve all weight from her limbs. The chill causing a rush of blood to forgotten places, an instant and revitalizing burst of energy. Stunned by the sudden cold and overwhelming clarity of the world, Mrs Webb felt herself buoyant, reborn. Imagined she were seeing it all for the first time. She took a serene little sigh and let her eyes shut, beginning with her backward strokes –focusing now on the lapping in her ears, the meditative splashes of alternating arms. The sun inching higher, warming her face as it went.

“The last time I looked over at her” said Mrs Benson-a pre breakfast bather and bingo club acquaintance, in her tearful statement to the Fishhoek weekly that afternoon, “She looked like an angel, an angel in a little red swimming cap”.

Today, Mrs Webb thought, I shall do a stroke for every year I have lived-yes, seventy five was ambitious but not impossible. She would not let herself be defeated by a number- two seemingly insignificant digits. The first thirty strokes she accomplished with ease. It was on the forty-fifth that she worried she might not succeed, on the sixtieth she wished she had not lived so bloody long, and on the seventy fifth that she vanished from out of the ocean –and off the face of the earth—completely.

A strolling couple on the beach reported a brief disturbance in the water, the sight of Mrs Web slipping beneath the surface never to return.  A fisherman on the near by rocks however claimed he saw her backstroke right into the monsters mouth (its unmistakable grin and fin flashing in the morning light). Humming Chopin and smiling to herself, smiling (he said she was) as she imagined her grandsons face over the birthday lunch –that never was– or attempting to resolve the great jam debate: strawberry over apricot? Apricot over strawberry?

 It was a niggling in Mrs Webb’s side, no more inconvenient than what she had woken up with that morning, certainly nothing the nurse at the home couldn’t medicate when she returned to the shore. A concise pain followed by a pungent fishy smell, an epiphany of ‘Apricot!’ and then silence.