Like it Matters (11 page)

I knew there was.

But I also knew that if you had a mean heart you might say,
Bad enough is bad enough
, and it didn’t matter much either way.

It was amazingly soon after the phone call that we heard Dewald’s car coming down the road. This rumbling, roaring thing—it sounded like an entire motorbike gang was arriving.

We went out to the gate to meet him just as he turned the corner—his car, either the brakes or something in the steering column, moaning like a whale before he came to a stop right in front of us. When he turned off the ignition the engine shook and whinnied and snorted like a mad horse.

Dewald drove a nineties Monza, except it didn’t much look like a car anymore. It was a dark, dark purple colour, and it had acid green stripes painted down the middle. Racing stripes, and a big, gothic
D
on the bonnet. The suspension was sunk so low you could hardly put your fist under the body and the mags were spiked and on the back it had a spoiler that fanned out like a pair of batwings.

I’d been drinking for hours at that point and it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen, and I looked over at Charlotte and she was beaming

But then the door opened

And I got a glimpse

Jesus—not again

That wasn’t Dewald, that was TJ

That was definitely TJ!

The bottom fell right out of my stomach

And I had to turn away or else I was going to fall over, and I heard Charlotte saying hello to him and then I heard her calling, “Ed! Ed, come say hi! What’s wrong?”

And I listened, I listened so hard for that high, kind of lisping voice I’ll never forget, and then I thought I heard it.

Maybe not as high, actually.

Slowly, slowly I turned round—and there he was, standing right next to Charlotte, side by side.

Instinctively, I put my hand up to my face—maybe I was trying to hide myself, I’m not sure—but my hand scraped on my beard and I thought,
Fuck, at least there’s that.

Was he shorter than TJ?

And he looks the same age as he did back then—so that’s impossible, right?

I stuck out my hand and he shook it really hard and he said, “Beslis.” Then he hugged me.

I said, “Let me help with your bags.”

He said, “Kiff. Dis net daai manne,” and he pointed to two gym bags on the back seat.

“Is that
it
, Dewald?” Charlotte said.

“More or less, hey. Except the important stuff,” he said, then smiled and took a screwdriver out his pocket. I put the bags on my shoulders and watched him stick the screwdriver in under the steering wheel, near the hooter, and it made a popping sound and then he unclipped the front and sank his arm down
into
the steering wheel. It was fucking awesome and he knew we were staring. I heard him say, “This is the best thing about this car, I tell you”

And then I took off to the house.

I dropped his bags by the couch in the lounge and then I went to the bathroom and locked the door. I lay down for a while on the cold floor, telling myself I was crazy, that wasn’t TJ, that was Charlotte’s
cousin
. Just like that wasn’t my dad back at the traffic lights that day, it was some poor homeless guy and they are legion. Telling myself again and again,
It’s demons you’re battling, Ed, not ghosts
.

It didn’t help, and I went and stood in front of the mirror and tried so hard to remember what I looked like when I was eighteen.

Short hair.

No beard. Some shit sideburns, maybe.

Probably weighed more back then

And I knew I couldn’t hide in the bathroom all night but I also told myself I wasn’t allowed to drink anymore, either—I needed to be sharp in case it all went to shit—and I splashed some water on my face and I was about to go out into the lounge

But then there was a knock on the bathroom door.

For about five seconds, I honestly had this vision of TJ bursting in and breaking my skull against some tiles in the shower, but then I heard Charlotte, in this tiny voice, saying, “Ed? Ed?”

And when I opened the door, she was standing there with this look on her face—I’d seen that look just once before in my life, on my dad. When I was fourteen he caught me smoking in the shed and he tried to punish me by making me chain-smoke the whole box in front of him—except it didn’t work, I did it easily; if anything, he got drunk while he was watching me

And I remember that look—

This
I know I’m a fuck-up but I need you to love me for it
kind of look—

And there it was again, on Charlotte’s face.

I held her close and I could just make out what she was saying.

“Dewald wants to go to town, Ed. What are we going to do?”

I was still too shocked by the sight of TJ to say much

But after we went out to the lounge and he was being so friendly to me—

He really didn’t seem to get who I was—

And after he showed us his Magic Box, this poker set, with the foam columns all filled with little bags of different stuff, various powders and pills

And after he’d made his Concoction and put it in a big glass pipe that looked like a sex toy, and after Charlotte gave in so easily and smoked some

I also broke The Rule.

Shattered the fucking thing.

D
EWALD
’
S CAR HAD A STEEL DASHBOARD
and red velvet seats, and it smelled like a combination of hash and that fucking Golden Products carpet cleaner I used to have to hawk with my dad.

I was in the back seat and when he turned the car on I could feel the chassis shaking, and from the front there was this progressively demented sound while the engine warmed up.

We went slowly through Muizenberg and the edge of Lakeside, shuddering when we stopped at robots, but jeez, as soon as we turned onto the
M3
and got some open road to play with, Dewald fucking gunned the thing

And the car felt good going fast—it felt great, it felt on the verge of lifting off and I didn’t care if it did, I dared it to. Charlotte had her head out the window and she was shouting at the other cars when we flew past them. Dewald put the music on and the system he had rigged up in there was so loud it made my ribs buzz.

I still couldn’t tell if getting high had been a good idea or not—I’d kind of go through waves. I’d stare at Dewald, and I’d see a completely new person behind the wheel and I’d be feeling wonderful

But then he’d scratch his nose or light a cigarette or something and I’d remember TJ so clearly it was sickening. At one point, he reached back over his shoulder and handed me a capsule, and the way he winked when I took it, I swear, there were voices in my head shouting,
He knows! He knows!

And I had to lie down on the back seat and try pull myself together.

I could hardly breathe, thinking,
He’s haunting you, Ed.

He’s always been haunting you.

This thing with TJ happened when I was eighteen and I was still living in Grahamstown. I’d finished school but I was doing nothing with myself—really, nothing. My dad had stopped bothering with solid food by that point and I was the only person in the whole world who knew how fucked he was. I didn’t tell my friends about it, even when I started seeing them less and less and they kept asking me why. My dad had also lost all his friends by then—the one stalwart, Willie, still used to come round sometimes, but his jam was to siphon petrol out my dad’s tank and then sit in the lounge all afternoon huffing it from a paint tin.

I’d really wanted to go to varsity. The money my mom had left me in the trust—I got it when I turned eighteen—would’ve covered the fees but then it would’ve been wiped out, and I guess I was scared of seeing it all go so fast. I knew I should’ve at least made a hobby out of sorting my dad out, but I couldn’t, not back then I couldn’t. Right before all this happened with TJ, honest to god, the plan really was to pull myself together and get a job, then pack my dad off somewhere decent and go to varsity the next year. I was always meant to actually do something with myself, I promise. This was just the first time I got derailed …

My thoughts spun off like that—I was thinking about my dad some more

But then I felt the car brake sharply, and I sat up.

I could see lots of flashing lights outside the windows.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Relax,” said Dewald. “Red lights. Bad news vir iemand, maar nie vir ons nie.”

When we got to town whatever was in that capsule had put a flying feeling in me

And Charlotte had her face up against her window, her hands also on the glass—she was somewhere else entirely

And it must’ve been payday or something because the city was seething. While we were stopped at a robot the music went softer, and then we inched our way down one of the side roads towards Long Street, bar lights shining into the car, so many people out on the street, all of them dressed up and lurid like figures out of oil paintings. We made the turn and more faces swung past the window, Charlotte laughed, and then Dewald double-parked the car and put the emergencies on. I opened my door and I spilled out into the street, a car went by, I could feel the heat off its bonnet, I closed my door and opened the passenger side and I helped Charlotte out into the middle of all that bright noise …

Mostly they spoke together in Afrikaans, and I could follow them, sort of, but I didn’t really want to talk in case they teased my accent, and so I went out onto the balcony and smoked a joint with a Portuguese guy who told me the reason that town was so nuts was because it’d just been announced we were getting the World Cup in 2010. I didn’t ask which sport.

I’d only had a couple of drinks before my stomach started roiling, and the joint made me introspective and so back at the table I was just having glass after glass of water and I was feeling quite good about myself. Charlotte had bleary eyes and a bit of a vague, sexy stare fixed in them—she was cocktail drunk, but she was handling it okay. Not like Dewald, who’d ploughed through like twelve beers and about as many shots—he was hanging on by a thread. They disappeared together a few times to go bump something, just going behind the gambling machines at the back of the place. They told me it was cat and it must’ve been strong, they’d come back to the table and they’d be twitching and quiet, then loud and erratic when they started to talk.

I wasn’t even tempted. It hardly ever happens, but I was feeling fine just the way I was. I was staring at Dewald mostly, and I was stuck into thinking about that Festival when it all went wrong.

I remember I was trying to run into some drugs at the time, but the problem was my friend for this kind of stuff, Phil, he’d already fucked off to Cape Town, and I didn’t know who else to speak to. How I solved it, finally, was I found some schoolkids smoking dope in a side street near the Village Green, and I threatened to call their headmaster if they didn’t tell me where they’d bought it. They told me a crazy story about this guy who wore a bright-blue pirate’s jacket around on the Green, calling himself Captain TJ, and his partner, this hot redhead who used to be a contortionist or something, but she did fire poi now. They told me that when they’d bought from them, they’d been in a big, lumo tent down at the campsite on the Albany fields.

It sounded like bullshit, but then I saw her in African Street, the redhead the kids were talking about, it couldn’t’ve been anyone else but her

And I followed her all the way to the Albany fields, too shy to catch up and say anything.

We walked through the family area—mostly Afrikaners, with jacked tents and skottelbraais—and then when we were getting near the edge of the site I heard this deep throbbing electronic music playing out of a bakkie, and I knew that’s where she was headed. I saw the lumo tent the kids’d told me about.

I hung back and I watched her soak her poi in little buckets of paraffin and then light them and start dancing over by the bakkie—this strange style, elegant but sort of grungy and primitive at the same time. At some point she saw me, so then I had to say something because otherwise it’d be weird

But I’d hardly started talking to her before, from the tent, I heard this thin voice shouting, “Fuck, shut up!”

And then TJ stuck his head out the flap and said, “Shut
up
, man. Jissus.”

I was a bit stunned that he could even hear me over the music, but I asked him, “Listen, TJ, could you maybe help me out with something?”

And he shook his head at me and rubbed his hands over his face. “So I must just forget sleep? Hey? Fok. Come in the tent here.”

I ducked inside and it was terrible in there—the air was thick and it smelled like sweat and hangover. “Thanks so much, man,” I said. “Sorry if I woke you up.”

“You have to
go to sleep
before you can
wake up
, bru. Jissus.” He rubbed his face again. His eyes were like tiny slits and his jaw just kept moving and moving. “So what do you want?”

“I don’t know, something fun, up stuff. Coke, maybe?”

He shook his head and said, “No, pal”—but then I could see him remember something, this quiver went through his face, and he sat up straight and said, “Shit.” He started digging around in his sleeping bag and he pulled out a pair of jeans. He put his hands in all the pockets, saying, “Come on, come on, come on,” and then he smiled and said, “Daarsy.” He dropped the jeans and he was holding a tiny plastic bag and a scrap of paper. He found a bank card in another pocket and then tipped some powder out of the bag and onto the card. Then he tried to lift the card to his face, but his hand was shaking so much he ducked his head down instead, and sniffed all the powder off the plastic. “Alright,” he said. “Battery’s charging.”

I asked him if I could just buy some of that, but he told me that was the last of it. He showed me a number on the scrap of paper from his jeans and he said he needed to buy more. He asked me if I had a car.

I told him I might be able to borrow one, and then he just turned around and pulled the sleeping bag over his shoulders and said, “Two hours. Come get me here.”