The Ghost-Eater and Other Stories (25 page)

Later, they had cried and laughed over the poems in that book with the pendulous breasts. They had cried for the ranting poet who refused to keep silent about being a woman caught between ageing and death. They had sobbed for Adeela, who had a one-in-a-hundred chance of seeing old age. They had cried for the soon-to-be-orphaned Lilly, sleeping in her room. And in among those tears, Crystal sobbed for herself. Of all the poems they had read out loud to each other that night after Adeela came home from her double mastectomy, she remembers only two lines off by heart:

 

this she knows: nobody will ever again breathlessly

peel desire from her shoulders.

 

Adeela is fast asleep, a deep morphine bliss. Crystal gets up and walks across to the kitchen table, picks up the book. She leafs through the pages, watching the familiar titles flip past till she reaches the inside front cover. She reads the note that she wrote:

 

Never give up!

Thanksgiving – 22 November 2012

 

Below it, a new inscription, in Adeela's handwriting, reads:

 

For Crystal

May you live long enough for the tight to become loose, and may you revel

in all those who are breathless in your company.

A.

22 September 2013.

 

Crystal guiltily lays the book back on the table, feels she is trespassing. Tears claw up her throat, scald her sockets. She hears Lilly turn off the shower. She cannot cry now. Really, she should have known better than to nurse a friend. Crystal unwraps the cellophane from the flowers, picks out those already drooping and drops them into the stainless steel trashcan. This is it. The very limit. She's going to quit, just as soon as Adeela goes. She can't do it anymore. Crystal fills a tall glass vase with water, adds the long-life mix and stirs, gathers up the roses and places them one by one into place, shifts them around a little. There. She lets out a little sigh of satisfaction. What I'd really like to be, she thinks, is a florist.

 

On the morning after the night before, she took the service lift down to the ground floor of St Martini Gardens.

It was time to go. This was one night she was determined to forget. She didn't want to dwell too long on what was hurting her. She never wanted to be someone who compared pain: yours, theirs, ours, mine. But when she was honest she did – all the time. The shame of creeping out of an apartment was nothing. Nothing compared to what happens under lights, on any given night, on the graveyard shift in an emergency ward of a public hospital, anywhere in South Africa. She convinced herself that experience was relative.

She brushed her hair back and, save for feeling slightly nauseous, convinced herself that she was fine, physically. She took a breath and tried to imagine a life of pure comfort and ease, without the struggle. Impossible, she laughed.

Earlier that morning, she had disentangled herself from the semi-comatose weight beside her. She quietly extracted herself from his latch. She tried to be as quiet as possible. She wanted to leave before he noticed her and she became as real as traffic, doctor's bills, the burr of the fridge. She wanted to leave before he noticed that all the lights were left on and the sheets were grimy and lifting off the mattress. She escaped before the confrontation of an interaction.

It certainly felt like a summer solstice in Cape Town. She had been wearing the same T-shirt for three days, wearing what had spilled from her in the night like a stain. Her cheeks were a lattice of weird patterns; probably from sleeping on an elastic band tied too tightly to her wrist. The red lines in her skin resembled gash marks from an animal, like someone else had done this to her, proof of someone else on her skin.

 

She remembered the night before and regretted how in the flood of feeling, without thinking, she was so easily drawn into consuming another person. Their faults, their fuck-ups, all became alluring to her in the night. She had justified his actions without fully understanding her own consent. She had forgotten that no experience comes without a cost. She remembered too late. Everything can have meaning if you let it, she told herself. Don't let it.

The night's side-step had begun in Long Street. Relentless trance beats had pushed them (hazed over) from club to club. Rubbing up against strangers, vein to vein, their humanity thrashed in each other's faces, anxiety ruining any conversation. It was so Cape Town: people spoke through the set and after, conversations were truncated mid-sentence.

He walked into the club in a cloud of radical self-belief. Arrogance would have been a euphemism for his behaviour; wild and hedonistic, he was not afraid to take what he wanted. He was the first to take off his top in the sweaty club, even his chest hairs swirled like the stars of Van Gogh's starry night. He kissed four other girls before noticing her, but she didn't care. He claimed he had superior genes: he was reproductively relevant, smarter, more aggressive.

The night's comedown began on the staircase of the Waiting Room. At this point, she was unaware that she had begun to memorise this person, merge his story with her own. This happened before muscle memory had set in and he had begun to weigh down on her now-heavy suitcase skin. She still felt malleable. All she wanted was to be witnessed. Someone noticed the detail of her eyelash on her cheek, her missing earring and tucked her hair behind her ear. This was all she needed.

Before the language of desire, these simple gestures were illuminating. She had begged for it, she so easily gave into it and when she had it, her body sang. She had asked for this.

They were drinking fast and sudden, competing to see who would be the first to surrender. When he came back from the bathroom he laughed. ‘You can take a whore to the water,' he said, ‘but she'll still order champagne.' He felt her breast, lumpy, his eyes softened – ‘Do you have cancer?' he asked.

At this point, she would do anything to wake up next to unfamiliar skin, in a different time, with a foreign language on her tongue.

They drove up at to 24-hour petrol station, calling it the party Engen on Orange Street. It was overpopulated. Crowded at three a.m. People hovering, demanding ice cream; someone had vomited in the toiletry aisle.

She could forget the details of the event but it was becoming harder to remove the feeling: she has jamais vu, the opposite of déjà vu, the familiar made unfamiliar, which helps make every experience feel like the first time, which must be why she kept on making the same mistakes.

She would distract herself, do the opposite of what she would usually – she would take the back roads, continue driving in the opposite direction. To forget means cultivating distraction; that is the only way out, or else she would remember the night before for too long. Getting in her beaten-up, dirty car, she grimaced at the window taped down with a black bag.

The memory resurfaced. He had pinned her to the wall of the petrol station, with a knife, at three a.m.

Driving, she watched as people in the street began their day again. The homeless couple who live between the Centre for the Book and St Martini Gardens were only then waking. Still caught in a sleepy embrace, they pumped music from a stolen radio. When she asked how they were, they responded with the surbuban cliché: ‘Surviving'.

Beside the unfinished highway on the way to Sea Point, a woman brushed up against her car. Her hand reached inside the window, asking for money or a donation. She held her wailing and wailing baby close to her chest.

Rolling up her window, she drives on. Points of contact are wasted on her. She passes the residence from her university days. It has a morgue underneath it. The whole building was once a hospital. Inside that building, too, people would be wailing and wailing She remembers how the doctors would tell their patients to sing until the anaesthetic took hold. Her memories are becoming confusing; is this memory her own? She gets into her car and is thankful for the silence. The older you get, the easier it becomes to forget things, she hopes.

The car runs out of petrol near the promenade in Sea Point. A parade of Jewish seniors and drug lords walks by. Their perfume smells of toilet spray. Nigerian store owners crab-walk beside her. The malaise of the day is spent in an unemployed haze. The residue of toilet spray is met with the smell of pea soup and baby powder. The seniors wait out the end of their days without the language to process their pain. Some of them get out of bed only to paint their lips and then to get back in again. Sometimes things are better left unsaid.

She sits on the rock, terrified of repeating her mistakes. She reminds herself that rock is also copper, magma, aluminium, quantum particles, waves, but ultimately it is just dust. A rock is deferred dust. She envies its transience. Life's experiences shouldn't have so much weight.

She cannot escape herself. She walks from Sea Point all the way to Clifton 4th. She takes a side route, to the back boulders. She keeps her old T-shirt on and black panties serve as a costume beneath it. She begins to swim out, far into the sea, the salt spitting into her. As she is swimming, she sees a man in the distance watching. She waves nonchalantly, trying to evade his gaze. She tries to ignore him but then he is coming closer. He begins to unbuckle his belt while she is still in the water. She paddles briskly to shore, gets up and runs to her car. He doesn't follow but she continues running, leaving her other earring behind.

Back to city as the sun is setting. Up to her apartment where she is becoming a professional hoarder. Her home is turning into an intricate museum of kitsch, memory and longing, gathering dust and time. It's only then that she starts to remember the night again. It's like wanting to get rid of that stranger in your apartment who just won't leave. They want to stay, to blot out reality – you want them to leave because they are becoming reality.

It's not the scale of the memory that matters but the size of the horror. Her DNA is just an archive of everything that has happened before her. She is a repetition of history. The effect of an injury can appear years after she has experienced it – best not to worry about it till then.

She often thought to herself that you can only handle a certain amount of complexity before it is time to sleep. She gets back into bed in the same apartment, with the same person, her doctor. She knows him well after all these years. She doesn't want him to find out where she was in the early hours of the morning. His week has been hard enough, he has his own traumas to tend. He is heavy with his own sense of loss. He is beginning to wake up. He has been sleeping all day and will be at the hospital soon, to begin his night shift. He always stays a little longer at the end of a shift to catch the nurses as they sing together before they hand over to the day staff.

She takes a Plan B pill out of her pocket, swallows it without his seeing (‘Better never to have been born', better to forget). She does not bring up what happened at three a.m. at the party Engen. Instead, she kisses him on the forehead and whispers, ‘I'm sorry for your loss.'

 

He just stopped coming. Three weeks in and his chair was empty, although no one had really noticed him in the first place. He had stared his way through those writing classes, through the comments, even the readings. He had blinked rarely, with eyes that cut into the musty space between us. I had seen that look many times before. Yet when it had been his turn to read, he read like some birds sing, filling those four or five minutes with something that sounded more like music than just words. Sally, the loud one, had said he had a beautiful voice, a perfect radio voice. I thought a voice like his would simply skip the physics of speech. He had only read one of his stories in the three weeks before his disappearance. It was short but compelling and spoke of a time I had long since packed away. His story altered the colour of the room. His voice seemed to control light. Even the fluorescents had dimmed when he read to us.

I had arrived early for our fourth class. The room smelt unused and empty after the Easter break. I sat down facing a wall of forgotten books, probably all unread. There were two foolscap sheets on a chair. I picked up the sheets and placed them in the slatted light on the table. I saw his name, started reading and felt myself slipping back.

 

 

‘Ondangwa Tower, Foxtrot Two Niner, vector twee nil zero? Confirm?'

The Puma rolled away from the base like a whale, its blades slapping at the dusk air. Our section would be dropped sixty kilometres north of the last contact, deep in FAPLA territory. We had to confirm the exact co-ordinates of a suspected ammo dump so the flyboys could drop a couple of fivers right in their laps.

Our section leader, Staff Volskenk, was an ex-miner with the hands of a boxer and a heart to match. He was a fair man, and any issues were usually solved with swearing and a slap. Typical army stuff. There were eight of us, all conscripts, excluding our Bushman tracker, Lappies. Lappies was built like a wire fence, but he was more wire than fence post. He glided over the veld, always ahead of us, picking at twigs and shovelling the sand with the remains of his army issue takkies. I don't think I ever saw him eat or drink.

By the time we were dropped at our Initial Point, the sky had turned purple, with faint streaks of red cloud skimming the horizon. We hiked across nothing but flatness for almost two hours, so when we reached that pimple of rock overlooking the depression, Wilmot christened it Mount Everest. We complained our way up the koppie in the blued evening light. Badenhorst, our overweight machine gunner, did most of the complaining. He whined on about having to lug extra belts of MAG ammo and his chances of being stung by a scorpion. Staff shut him up with a muzzle jab to the kidneys. Badenhorst's sidekick and ammo handler, Van Tonder, slapped one of the ammo belts and cackled, ‘Ja, Badie, Staff hates bladdy kakbakkers.'