When her departure finally befell on that fateful morning,
the weather was exaggeratingly calm. He stood searching with agitated eyes
across a vacant lounge, in the bedroom closets emptied save for his over-prized
suit and overcoat, some under garments scattered as though by a thief.
Bed meticulously made with sheets folded to resemble a
letter written with deep thought and mystery. He follows the daze into the next
bedroom where her son became his; a pensive little urchin with hazel eyes that
reared mischief rather than curiosity.
That’s how he recalled them at least,
and suddenly a chill clung about the silent duplex, lounging in a lifeless
delirium.
A sober isolation gripped him like a crazy blanket – a fresh
dullness hanging over his head still swimming in last night’s absurd tantrum.
Décor staring quietly in place, he had chosen to leave her crying; her son
safely visiting other boom-gated friends for a sleep-over. His mind needed only
indulgence in cheap nightclubs hosting stripper contests.
She, however, was very distraught.
That he knew or perhaps
wished in the deepest of his convoluted soul. He blamed for his failed
marriage, a first of other ethereal mundanities he was to experience.
Touching
his only left-over framed image on the coffee table, he realised that he hadn’t
seen his daunting resemblance in weeks.
He also hadn’t seen his daughter for
months, but there he sat on a faun leather couch missing another man’s
children.
Her birthday was approaching faster than the police who were
tailing him as a suspected illegal miner, yet he was vague in thought,
pondering the rash and immature choices of a bloated ego of a newly divorced
charlatan intent on avenging a castration suffered in secret.
Marrying soon after was dismal adventure as proven by absentia,
but it helped him then that she was there, for a while.
A beaming trophy wife
to gloss and flaunt among other infamous Zama Zama’s turned instant township
millionaires.
Had he been convinced otherwise, each glitzy expense he carried
for her crown could have been a jewel on his daughter’s head.
This he thought bitterly, hand railing dish-towels as he
stooped over to vomit last night’s debauchery into the kitchen basin.
On the
floor, cold he slumps and curls into tensile fetal position and morosely weeps
knowing at the back of mind that guilt was his only verdict on disconcerting
golden morning of reminiscence.
His sickness infiltrated every room in the duplex, smell of
puke and unflushed piss assailing him, alone needing another face to look at
for sympathy.
He cursed his friends for second, because most of them were
unsavoury animals or quitters when it came to marriage.
He didn’t need their company;
he didn’t them to weep as he did on the tiled floor.
The smell of the boys’ hair as he kissed their heads was
what could calm his nausea, maybe.
Not
hers.
Her memory in his crimson-eyed head was still clad in a putrid darkness,
exhaustingly painful.
And in that dreaded bedroom where sheets of a letter he
alone could read lay folded, he tossed his shivering body onto the bed hardened
by vacancy, enveloping his sobs into silent pillows that smelled of her.
And like all dreamers at day, he fell into a bottomless pit
children fear, and was overwhelmed by a velvety blackness – curled cold as
though the bed had turned into a box.
Tears stung like psalms from his
beseeching daughter under his feverish eyelids, but a body raped of any
succulent nectar was hers alone, not his stony skin which hides his most brutal
nakedness. Pillows offered no caustic kisses she forgot behind, only
channelling guilty memories, no tickling love through his volcanic veins.
***
When he awoke, drenched and longing not to be alone, he
realised she had also takenthe car, after a frantic search for the keys and a
cautious look into the garage.
He needed it to get around, but he supposed this
was another act of spite; the car, their hard-earned debt he blamed on her.
She
was of course nowhere to defend herself. It was among his purposeless friends
that he wanted to be, lost with other blunders that occur in their midst.
All images of their false love had to be eroded.
And as the clock struck midday he was walking
a scotching 30 minute stretch across a sleepy town he chose to live in, lightly
walled in a suburban setting of left-over white exclusivity.
And that eternal
illusion of exclusivity which prompts too many a greed had landed him where he
was on this day.
A car he needed to possess, but it was evidently gone now.
He walked into his friend’s hair salon smelling of heated fur and sweat, fumes
of chemicals always fluttering from the force of the fan attempting in vain to
rid whatever stench of beautification.
And what a perfect distraction a hair salon was to become,
with splendid women augmenting their eyelashes, polishing gossip with feline
flair while he sunk into their jests and frivolous laughter. It seemed he had
broken a long spell listening to giggles and secrets, even though his marriage
had lasted barely a year.
And here he was, privy to disclosures about infected
girls and other serial nymphs.
His stomach was calming down but hunger was rolling with
each wave of saliva swallowed, as he waited for his friend to finish with a
sickeningly quite client.
And once on their way to scavenge on toxic kiddie
meals, they pontificated about travesties of affection, such as when two broken
men meet to complain about the marvels of flawed acquaintances and other
privileges of allegiances.
“But why did you
choose a yellow-bone?
“She looked like a GQ
model my man. She still does.”
“Does that mean you
crave macheri amangamla?”
“Isn’t it why black
men work hard? To live like white men, with maybe a white woman?”
“That is a dangerous
way to look at life mfethu.” His friend replied.
“it’s not like I
imagine a white woman every time I fuck her...”
“And I am supposed to
believe that?
“You are just warped
man.”
As they chuckle in escape and intrigued anger, sitting among
loafers with their own adventure stories, he bears an inner silence – a death
of heart.
Without another word they vacate the ill stench of the eatery,
impossible to tell apart from the rot outside. August winds were rising and
started to chewing dust; this was his birth month, eerie and unrelenting upon
their blue souls.
He realised how he missed the noise of storms, upsetting
conversations and thoughts of numbers. He felt chained to his redundant company
and needed to be alone again, to gunner strength for a long haul of life’s
solitude.
He never violated the law unnecessarily, but nobody stays
pure in this world, it is said. Whatever nobility is desired in loving he knew
the cost and frailty of love like a child – only in death.
Mind wondering
through faces, sometimes seen as nemeses, they at times were those that held
him in high esteem, peers he bought expensive whisky on weekdays.
These were the distractions and lives deceiving his senses
with clown smiles tricking favours and gunfire away.
He always felt the law at
his tail, sniffing tracks of his straying steps through debris of forsaken
dreams, scars and the hopes they reminded him of.
But, this town of the abandoned
welders and boilermakers rusted like car-wrecks in unkempt suburban yards –
pudgy dogs barking at black skins at all hours of a maids stay; this was
Fochville where his hopes were to decompose.
***
After only a week, that turbulent spark of love became
impossible to resurrect, memories now fade into mirages of new acquaintances
and infatuations.
The eternal certainty that change is the fundament of all
existence therefore made sense whence the brother vowed to lose himself to
bouts of sexual debauchery and lust.
He made a concerted effort at always bedding any easy catch
as he’d come to see women, but his money was dwindling after loans sapped the
last of auctioned furniture.
New clothes were fading, even though he tried hard
to conceal the sight from a lot of his family members.
He hid more from himself
in fear of facing defeat through eyes of others, but secrets have a penchant
for darting their lizard tongues at unexpected times.
So the brother’s vase had to shatter, first crack coming in
the form of an eviction that couldn’t be averted with sly promises to pale
landlords sweating bullets.
Second was his mother, as shrewd as a loan-shark
let loose in a pond of coins.
She could read a gesture like a spy novel, all habitual
deceptions blown out of the swamp she dug greedily, while breeding ambition
which made him a money monster.
It was at this time that his sister became
acquainted with a new love in his life, yet another moody entrant he chased for
only a weekend amid cautious happiness and coded behaviour.
He, though assailed by a sad reverence for his mother, the
brother could not turn back upon footsteps that led him here.
His mother
remained one adversary he constantly avoided, even in the streets of this small
community whose secrets were borne like skid-marks for ogling curious urchins.
A brutal woman in her unabridged honesty; a god-like courage that helped her
raise four children of her own and seven others by her siblings.
How her words could cut like a double edged sword, hearts
molten by her strokes and quotations from the bible and other sermons.
And all
her profane reproaches had sadly alienated her children by now, so his sisters
had reason to hide his secret lover from their mother’s clawing.
Whatever inopportune scandal was discredited by his sisters,
their mother was becoming more suspicious while he was content with dodging
other shadows that could reveal his previous criminal activities.
He was always
on the lookout, a childhood that died young.
His mother was always sour, her
constant absence and unbearable presences made his feel unaccountable from an
early age, he thought.
But he was the one
bearing a curse, a vast cruelty though he never could lay a hand on a woman.
He
possessed a glossary of crude invocations that could strip and denude far
harshly than rape.
These he knew and always regretted, but it all seemed his
dark and eternal art, and in his mother a mirror of his monstrous soul.
***
It was one evening as a drizzle began to fall that in his
digression from morbid thoughts about his mother that he felt a nameless finger
jotting his story; a witchcraft that distracts his fate.
He floundered in a
fear of a dismal future unborn, as he
felt himself repeating too many mistakes, agonising about the inevitable and
just never being able to his past behind.
And once the booze were weighing
heavy in his belly, making himself home to other worries and unnoticed wishes,
a sudden anger blazed in him.
He wanted to run away from something, perhaps his new
girlfriend’s embrace and other souls that give him breathe perhaps; towards
some other softer exposure to vulnerability among strange thighs. He craved
unique women with favoured by frustrations; he grossly envied their
companionship that night, all his notepad fantasies and outrageous monologues
failing under the crush of slumber.
But tonight he was laying fully clothed and freshly caked
with sweat and expectations bigger than his mother’s – he wanted to avenge his
betrayal by all means sinister and taboo.
This crisp house made by this woman’s
debts only held the physical cold at bay, but he was as ice disguised in the
sober decor of his divine madness.
He would laugh sickly for what seemed a
moment, gravity at the back of his throat, a calendar of silences breaking into
mirth that was playing a joke on him.
And yes, mucus and tears filmed his throat as the night’s
mystery coated the air about him, waiting for her, who left with friends,
uneasy and hurt by his deadpan obscenities directed at her.
As dawn whispered with morning gales she returned having
developed strength for his impoliteness and ghastly reprimands.
His beer-hall
rudeness was boiling over and beyond redemption, but she sat there on her couch
bereft with rage at his cotton-candy love.
His days were numbered she knew, he had to leave, her soggy
hands clutching her phone sobbing throughout his apocalyptic tirade.
His blue
soul was flirting with disaster and she snapped, her bile invariably exploding,
a weary woman returning the froth of his vomit into his mouth.
She burst out
and admitted her HIV status as the purgatorial scene went outside into the
early morning stage with housewives as an audience sweeping dusty street.
He was now on a boat of the damned, she said, his mouth
hanging, fists clenched, a quizzing looking on his conquered face.
She started
throwing her clothes out her window, neighbours proven right and an ulcer of
jealousy being squeezed in his brain.
He wished to forget, but feminine vengeance has echoes; and
as the sun crept over the township he avoided, the taverns he hid in were
silent as an amnesiac, the bristles of
brooms hissing along as he crumpled his gear into a plastic bag to finally head
home.
