10 – Only Whites

New Order – Ceremony

It’s summer holidays and I’m at the beach most days just watching the day’s slowly drag out.  By nine on Saturday I’m on the Myna bus, heading down to South Beach.  Inside, the heat is overpowering. I stand in the middle holding my board as a buffer while more people force themselves onto the last bus out of Saigon.  On summer Saturdays it’s an all-stopper, taking every Vaalie and pensioner until all the breathable oxygen seems long used up.

As we lumber throughDurbancentral, all the adjacent buildings look old, not ancient old, but old like ’50s and ’60s old. There’s nothing new, no construction, nothing contemporary.  It’s looked exactly the same since as far back as I can remember.  Almost like the city’s been on hold all the time I’ve lived here.  Stuck in a past that seems designed specifically to exclude all things fun.  Concrete blandness lines the streets, office blocks that seem to hold nothing more than mail-sorters. The City Hall looks like a virtual replica of every other city hall in the world that screams ‘why try’.

We head downSmith Street’s cavernous tunnel from the top of town all the way down to the beach, dead straight and shielded from the day’s heat by residential blocks cascading into office blocks.

The city centre sucks out half our passengers and we continue through a cityscape trough of sunken industrial warehouses, run-down cinemas, auto-repair shops and ’60s government departments.  Closer to the beach, commerce designed for locals starts to gives way to tourists − car rental dealerships, hole-in-the-wall curry take-aways, surf-shops and try-and-die pizza crematoriums.

I sit with the others on the grass verge set back from the beach.  Only Vaalies actually lie on the beach in summer. Like the seasonal flu, they infest the place yearly, with tight Speedo’s, bristle moustaches and a half-dozen offspring − ice cream and beach sand caked to their burnt little faces.  Kids kneel on their rented Boogie boards, pile on the pink zinc and Coppertone Factor-4 in the shadows of the Whites Only signs dotted along the beach.

We sit on the towels covering our bodyboards, protecting them from the harsh midday sun.  We never read, we only watch, occasionally talk and even more occasionally enter the water.  The rip in North Beach is so strong it’s more effort than it’s worth to stay in one place. Looking around, I imagine we must look like a pack of stray dogs up there, knees crunched up to our chests, flannel shirts draped over our heads, looking out through Wayfarers over our territory for the next fight or feed.

11 – Monkeys Wedding

The Doors – Strange Days

Around 1pm, when we’ve dragged the morning out as long as our stomachs can handle, four of us, including Matt, walk the kilometre to the supermarket to get the standard bag of crisps and rolls.  Nothing happens quickly and it takes a full half-hour to negotiate the money and orders from the others before we can get away. Even negotiating the route takes time as it’s vital we find the grassiest way, since none of us have thought to bring our slops and are forced to sprint sections of the hot-coals road in our bare feet.  Inside the supermarket, we look like stop-motion can-can girls, alternately cooling our seared feet up on the chilled grills of the open fridge.  We walk through the tourist-packed aisles, talking loudly in our worst Afrikaner accents and pay with great handfuls of coins.

Back at the beach we search for, and finally find, the old guy selling Walls Ice Cream from the portafridge around his neck and buy frozen Minute Maid orange juice.  We pay him and he tells us he can get ‘Kiff poison’ if we like, and we look at each other and Matt says ‘We know, Larny.’

After lunch the beach gets increasingly crammed with tourist crowds ambling along the walkway beneath us.  Bored, we walk among them, pretending they aren’t there, apologising for intentionally getting in their way.

We kick a football between ourselves in the middle of the footpath, making an ever-widening circle until we’re stretched the across the walkway and the only way round for the tourists is up on the grass.  Three ‘no-car’ police appear out of nowhere and tell us to move off which we do.

When the lifeguards change over we rush onto North Pier with our boards and fins. The new lifeguard sees us and runs after us, blowing his whistle. Hopping from one leg to another, we attach fins to our feet, climb the rail and throw ourselves off the end onto the peak of the swell two metres below before he can get to us. We paddle out the twenty or so metres to the backline while he stares from the end of the pier.

The water is brown, warm and only briefly refreshing. For a while, we sit up on our boards, bobbing on the swells, trying to keep balance as the waves break a couple of board lengths in front of us.  The backline swell is a pretty consistent break but occasionally a monster set rises up out of nowhere breaking the tranquillity and forcing us to stretch our lungs, paddling furiously back to duck-dive the looming wash.

Another half-hour and having reasoned the lifeguard must by now be preoccupied with the daily grind of drowning or sunburnt Vaalies, we paddle across the Bay Pier to launch ourselves onSnakeParkbeach with another lifesaver.  In turns, we catch our first wave of the day back to shore.

By the time the sun should be hovering over the University its dark as night and pouring with rain so heavy it’s a continuous stream. My neck and back feel tight under my shirt from today’s sun, and the soles of my feet burn from the afternoon’s molten tarmac. We huddle under a seated shelter, boards dumped together in one corner as if it’s just as important they stay dry as it is us.  With the abandoned beach to ourselves, we look out over the pockmarked sea in the deafening thrum, the air smoky from steamed rain on hot pavements.

Vicky, gorgeous straight red hair, crush-material, sprints back from the toilet to the shelter.  She trips on the stairs down and gashes her shin, just below the knee. It splits open like a massive leer and I can see the bone before the blood begins to flow.  She screams.

When the rain lets up a little and the sun bursts rainbows, I jump on a bus home, staring at the dried bloody handprint at the base of the board. I daydream about her lips and putting my tongue between the gap in her teeth.

12 – Superflat

Robert Palmer – Johnny and Mary

It’s still probably in the early thirties by the time I get home, the humidity up to max, the air asthmatic and thick. All the doors and windows lie open while the sun sets, bloated. A hot Bergwind moves the sleepy air around the porch, saturating my clothes and sucking out my breath like bus slipstreams.  J.R. barks off the fence, down into the valley.  Barks return. The wind drops and the trees fronting the porch hold their breath.  Mum plays Barbara Streisand in the lounge.

Sitting outside on a wooden chair, the sun-side of it bleached grey, I watch a crashed BMW dragged slowly down the opposite side of the valley by a black tow truck. The road up top is a sharp V around the headland, which the BMW’s taken at speed, ripping through a carport wall and plummeting down the gully, flipping a couple of times in the process.

With a ginger beer in my hand, I watch them attach the winch and haul the flattened vehicle down the hill. I imagine the people are still in it, no seat belts, flopping around dead as the crushed wreck jerks over the bumps.

This is all the time I’m not at Faces, I think.  This is all the time I’m not seeing Belinda.

I take a sip and imagine it’s my own dead body inside. My head repeatedly hitting the steering wheel, my torso crumpled into the dash. I imagine Belinda in the passenger seat, skull split open and bleeding.

This is the start of the time I won’t be with her and it hurts.  Even now, I know how little I’m conceding any of this is my fault. My snap-reflex is to think my brain is the enemy, my logic my parents. I’m a creature not of my own design, but somehow cultivated.  And sometimes this makes sense, when I’m lazy and not disposed to analysis, and other times decisions that I’m expected to make and opinions I’m supposed to have seem just like onerous burdens.  Choices are there just to show how devoid I am of the qualities required to mark me out as an adult.  I am sub-adult.  Unsmart.  Or maybe I have it all wrong and the hurt is just guilt. In which case, so be it.  None of it seems clear to me.  The things I do, the choices I make, always seem so double and triple thought that they mark the end of some long line of marginal, almost inseparable options. Except when I’m drunk, of course.  The fuck-ups made while drunk have at least a degree of freshness. Of honesty. At least to me.

I think what I really need is a proper beer and I wander back inside, leaving the wreck to extricate itself, unwatched.  I close my bedroom door and slide Bauhaus in and turn it up loud − try to wash away some of the wailing Streisand. I lie back on the bed, the fan making its slow scan over my body.  Mum walks in and tells me turn it down and I do.

The top shelf of my cupboard is littered with kid stuff: Space Lego, old teddy bears and BMX gear. Stuff I’m not really sure what to do with, yet. Next year it will migrate towards the back where it can remain hidden. The year after that it’ll probably move to the garage, charity shop or bin. My surrounding walls are almost entirely covered with pictures of bands.  The posters in flux; moved, thrown out or replaced on a regular basis.  All, that is, except for Transvision Vamp. Wendy James faces out from my bed, a sun around which the solar system of competing bands revolves. I imagine there must be lesser-known planet-axes around the room that have their own gravity and poster-moons unknown to me.

The phone rings and my heart drops.  I don’t get up and answer it because it’s not my phone.  Mum doesn’t knock, she just walks in, sleep lines firmly carved in her tired, old face, and for an instant Telegram Sam and Woman in Love meet in a twisted mix.

‘It’s for you.  Can you turn that awful shit down, please?’

‘I already have,’ I tell her.

‘It’s one of your little Goth friends. CamI think,’ and then, after a pause while she contemplates the music, she says, ‘I don’t understand how you can listen to this noise.’

I walk through to her room and she heads back down the passageway towards the kitchen, giving me some room.  Dad is nowhere around. Maybe he hasn’t come home from work yet. I briefly consider how I haven’t seen him in a while as I pick up the phone.

‘Hello?’ I say. The phone is a perilous mix of mum’s perfume and morning breath.

‘Yeah, it’s me.’

‘Right,’ my heart pounds with sheer fucking relief.

‘NotCam,’ he says

‘No. Evidently.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ says Matt.

‘Nothing broe, what’s happening?’

‘Well, we’re meeting at Belinda’s at seven for a couple of aperitifs.’

‘Aperitifs are after dinner, moron.’

‘Exactly,’ says Matt.

‘Okay, whatever.  So what?’

‘Come on, I heard what happened,’ he says, sounding a little bored.

‘Really, from who?’ I flip the phone around to my other ear and attempt to unravel the thick cord.

‘Does it fucking matter?’

I don’t say anything and after a while, he says, ‘You’re such a moron.  I was there remember?  She still … you know … wants to … you know, be friends and all.’

I change the phone back to the other ear, lying back on mum’s bed, trying to get comfortable in the monster pillows, like she’s expecting King Kong.

‘So she knows you’re inviting me?’

‘I’m not inviting you, she is. She said to call you.’

‘So you wouldn’t have otherwise?’

‘Don’t be like this, man.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like an ass.’ He says ‘You there?’ as I try to snap out of it, try to hammer out a full stop on this self-indulgence.

‘Okay, yeah, I’m here. Are we going to the Workshop?’

I can’t mention Faces or any variations as mum knows about the place and has lectured me more than once about not going.  She knows about the club because the school knows about the club and has threatened to expel anyone it finds going, although it still seems unclear exactly why or on what basis since Faces doesn’t have a licence and isn’t over eighteen. So it’s all code now.

‘Yeah we’re definitely going.  There’s no question. You coming, right?’

‘Yeah, I’m coming,’ I say.

He says, ‘Good. Hello?’

‘Hello?’ I say.

He says ‘Thanks for calling’ and before I can say ‘I didn’t’ he hangs up and J.R. barks from the front porch and the wind stirs through the curtains.

13 – Only Black

Siouxsie and the Banshees – Happy House

I wrap Belinda’s present on the floor of my bedroom with last year’s red Christmas paper, colouring in the green holly leaves with black felt pen. I fend off a curious J.R. with my other hand and foot.

After a shower to get rid of the sticky seawater, I pull a plain black T-shirt carefully over my sunburnt neck and back. My black jeans are so tight I have to lie on the bed with my legs in the air just to get them over my ankles. My black canvas high-tops complete my monochrome look.  What I really need, I think, are some of those 14-Hole Docs that Mike et al have, but the only store that sells them is Moola’s up in Joburg, which might as well be Lusaka for all the likelihood of my getting there any time soon.

I remember telling Lindy Kris’ story about theUKpost box baggy and Docs as she sat on my lap, her legs wrapped around my back, her black stockings heavily laddered and her tartan skirt too short.

She said how would they know your size?

When Mum reluctantly drops me off at Belinda’s, I’m the first one there.  Belinda and I sit cross-legged on the floor while she paints my nails black, until I remember her present in my bag. She’s only kinda excited, trying to hold back, I think.  She gets a little more animated when she sees it’s Nina Hagen and Siouxsie tapes.  She puts on The Banshees and I look at my nails, dumb, all bitten down.  It’s good to see Belinda happy, I think, as she jumps around the room spraying the best part of a can of Salon Selective in the general direction of her blue-black fringe, pulling and re-pulling the fan into shape.

I sit against the far wall, wondering if we’ve broken up.  There’s probably something I need to say. Some smart, quick apology followed by a light romantic gesture and a firm token of commitment that’s needed. Unlikely, really.  She already has her present so I might just have to hope I can get my hands down the back of her tights some other way.

She certainly doesn’t seem to be acting like we’ve broken up.  She’s invited me along tonight, but we haven’t kissed or anything.  But then again, I haven’t tried.  She looks at me as if she knows what I’m thinking and asks me how her hair looks.  I tell her she looks like a thin, good looking Elvira and she tells me to light a cigarette and I do.   And she does look cute: black see-through chiffon top on a black bra, black short flair-skirt over her tights, and black ankle boots.  It’s as if my renegade grope with Lindy has just flared up the reasons why I’m with Bel in the first place.  She sits in front of her ancient, bulb-framed make-up mirror and carefully draws Egyptian eyes.

Since I’m allowed nowhere near Belinda’s bed while her mum’s around, she gives me a pillow from the bed to sit on.  The pillow and everything else in Belinda’s room is pink, as if she’s just house sitting for someone else. Like she can’t make up her mind, or maybe, I think, she’s between something.  The bed is pink and fluffy pink teddy bears sit up-top the pillows.  The walls are more salmon, a dirty pink from all the smoking that’s gone on. And above her bed, smug in its minority status, is a Madonna True Blue poster.

I smoke incessantly out of nervousness. She continuously steals drags off me and then dramatically waves the smoke away from her, exhaling loudly while she stares at the door.  The evening’s preparation continues as she sprays You’re the Fire in front of her and walks through the cloud, fist on hip, head held high.  When I laugh, the Maltese poodles yap from outside and Janice stomps down the corridor, pushing open the door. With curlers covering the fingers of one hand and feet set apart, she yells at Belinda, ‘I don’t want that fucking door shut.  You hear me, Missy? I’m not stupid.’

Janice was pregnant with Belinda at sixteen and was a mum by seventeen. She’s young, I think, but that doesn’t make her not stupid.

Belinda says to her ‘Can you just get out, please?’ and Janicelooks at me like she’s just noticed me and then walks out, telling no one in particular ‘I’m going to phone your mother and tell her you smoke.’

14 – Dave

The Del Shannon doesn’t cover the screaming that pours out of the kitchen after Dave kicks in the security gate, drunk from some all-day pub crawl inYellow-WoodPark.

‘What time do you call this?  Do have any idea how late we’re gonna be for Liz’s party?’  There’s no answer, just the sound of beer bottles being thrown into the bin, setting off the dogs again.

‘And can you honestly expect me to turn up with you in this state?‘ Look at you.  Just look at how hopelessly drunk you are.’

I hear Dave wander out of the kitchen into the lounge, probably checking for strangers.  ‘I’m fine,’ he yells back, stumbling over the red cracked-ice Formica kitchen table in the middle of the lounge.

‘And anyway, I can just stay here,’ he says, before flopping onto the couch.

‘Bullshit,’ yells Janice over the hair dryer.

With Belinda’s fringe finally matching some vaguely idealized state, we sit together against the wall, pretending the domestic isn’t going on outside.

Dave says ‘What’s Bel doing tonight? She going out?’ The hair-dryer stops and Janice steps into the passageway. ‘There’s no way you are staying here tonight, okay?  And I’m not taking you with me, so you might as well take your smelly gob back home. Now would be good.’

Over the tape-deck, we hear Dave get up, hitting the wall on his way back into the kitchen. Just past Janice’s bedroom, he yells ‘I’m coming out with you, and that’s fucking final.  It’s only…’ and there’s a long pause while he presumably tries to find his watch underneath his long-sleeved button-up ‘… seven o’ clock.’ He continues in the general direction of the kitchen.

Belinda resumes grooming and asks me to make her a coffee. I get up and head towards the kitchen, squeezing past Belinda’s grandmother, moving slowly in the same direction. The poodles start yapping at my heels like I just walked in and I give a pointed kick at one of them but I’m way too slow and they’re wise to me now.

Dave looks a wreck, slouched on the kitchen bench against the wall.  His dirty work shirt is missing the top three buttons. The right side of his face is sunburnt, as is his exposed shoulder.

‘Hey,’ he says as I walk into the kitchen

‘Hey, Dave. Good day?’

The crevices in his leathery hands are stained and his fingers are almost completely black from engine oil.  He has managed to pour himself a beer but most of it is froth and overflowing onto the peach laminate fold-down table.  The kitchen reeks of heated dog food and Janice’s cheap perfume.

‘Yeah, too much sun,’ he says by way of explanation.

‘Yeah, me too.’

He slurs his way through ‘What are you up to tonight?’

‘Um, we’re off to Cam’s for a braai,’ I say, using our cover story.

‘I didn’t think you guys did braai’s. Is Cam the moffie?’

‘Uh. No. What you doing?’

He takes a long pull on the glass.

‘Heading out with Jan,’ he says, slowly putting the half-empty glass back down on the table. ‘I don’t know why she gives me such a hard time.’

‘Me neither.’

‘She’s always giving me a hard time. I pay her rent.’ He looks up at me, imploringly.  ‘Did you know that? And I don’t even live here. Hey, now listen,’ he says, and it occurs to me he’s forgotten my name. He takes another long pull on the beer, finishing it one. He looks back up at me and it’s clear he’s forgotten what he was going to say as well. Instead, he says, ‘I don’t know why I bother.  It’s hard work sometimes.  Relationships and all.’  Then he suddenly remembers. ‘If I could tell you one thing it would be this,’ he says, and I look around wondering if Janice will walk in to hear this colossal piece of advice, too: ‘Don’t ever get married, hey?’

He says it with such vehemence I’m a little taken aback.  He’s only Janice’s boyfriend.

‘Worst mistake you could make,’ he continues nearly knocking over the glass.

Janice walks into the kitchen, the back of her dress hanging loose. ‘Like you’d fuckin’ know,’ she says, and then to me, ’Ignore this fuckin’ imbecile, Charl.  Zip me up, please?’

‘Ah why don’t you shut your yapping trap. It never stops,’ he says.  ‘It’s like those fuckin dogs. I wish I could just take them outside, one at a time and shoot them,’ and he mimes pointing a shotgun at them. ‘Bang. I’m busy talking to Charl here, okay?’

With her back to me and mine to his, I try to pull up the stiff zip, trying not to feel the warmth of her skin on my shaking fingers. Only now do I notice how anxious I am.  I’m not sure if it’s because I’m so close to Belinda’s mother or that I have my back to Dave.

She says, ‘Then where’s the ring on my finger, hey?’

There’s a knock on the front door and dogs scamper off.

‘There,’ I say. ‘Done.’

To me, pointedly ignoring her, Dave says, ‘Women. they’re not worth it, Charl. Just keep fuckin’ around as long as you can. That’s my advice to you.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Will do. You mind if I have a beer, Dave?’

‘Sure, help yourself, me casa…’ but he drifts off.

‘No he can’t, Dave, he’s only sixteen.’ Janice picks up the empty dog bowls and starts to wash them out in the sink. She says, ‘And it’s not your bloody casa.’

Ignoring her, I grab a Castle from the giant but virtually empty Smeg fridge and twist it open in front of her.

‘Why don’t you go home, Dave?’ she says as I take a long pull on the beer.

‘Why don’t you stop being such a cunt?  For once?’

She stops dead and the whole room seems to hold its breath as I swallow.

‘Oh dear, I just got called a cunt. In my own home.’

I walk back down the corridor as Belinda yells out from her room ‘Jan!’, embarrassed by her language.

‘No, no, it’s okay, Bel, I just got called a cunt.’

‘Mum!’

‘In my own home!’

The toilet flushes and Belinda’s grandmother pokes her head out the bathroom door and asks of no one in particular, ‘What’s all this noise, Janice?’ And then, as if she’s answered her own question, she says, ‘I think we’ve run out of toilet paper in there.’

I walk back into the bedroom as Belinda spins the ashtray, so the lipstick covered cigarette she’s clearly just lit points away.

‘Where’s my coffee?’ she asks as if nothing just happened.

‘Um, I got this beer instead,’ I say, assuming my position on my pink pillow as the screaming outside continues.

‘How did you get a beer?’ she asks, closing the door and turning up the volume.

‘Dave gave it to me. Hey, Ian, Robyn.’ The self-proclaimed King and Queen of Goth have arrived while I’ve been in the kitchen rescuing beer. They sit on the bed, their backs against the wall.

‘I hate him.  He’s such an asshole,’ Belinda says. ‘I don’t know why she puts up with him.  He’s drunk every Saturday night.  Why it surprises her is anybody’s guess.’

Ian doesn’t acknowledge me in any way, and Robyn merely waves, looking bored.

Belinda sits back down and applies more base to her already pale face. ‘He’s such an asshole. I wish he would just leave.’ And then, after some thought, she adds ‘Forever’.

‘Have some beer,’ I suggest to her, offering the Castle.

‘Yeah right,’ she says. ‘And Janice won’t be able to tell.  There are prison wardens out there, less controlling.’

‘That’s all true,’ I say, still holding out the beer to her, ‘but I bet Robyn has some mints in her bag.’ I smile at Robyn but she rolls herself into a tighter ball against the wall, as if I’ve just wished some ill upon her. She looks down and Ian fake-smiles back and rests his hand gently on her raised knee.

The gradual socialisation of Robyn and Ian is ritual.  For the first five minutes, they’ll ignore everyone, remaining icy, aloof and solitary players in their own game of Silence. Until they feel they’re being ignored, when Ian will start giggling like a girl and Robyn will begin complaining about her school’s general intolerance of accessorization.

We hear the back door slam open against the Smeg, and over the music Dave’s drunken yell ’Well, why do I pay half the fucking rent then?’ followed shortly by the sound of the unbreakable highball glass hitting the side of the sink.

There’s a soft knock at the door. The tiring poodles yap and Belinda’s grandmother yells out from her front room ‘Bel, what’s that popping noise?’

‘Nothing, Gran,’ Belinda says walking out. ‘Just some visitors.’

‘You’ll need a plaster then?’

Matt and Camwalk in behind Belinda, looking a little alarmed, and behind them I see Dave storming past and out of the house, six-pack of dumpies in his filthy hands.  Belinda changes the tape to Nina Hagen and applies more lipstick in the mirror.

‘Where’d you get the beer?’ asks Matt, staring at me, gently letting his canvas bag slide off his shoulder onto the floor like he hadn’t noticed.

‘Jehovah’s Witness,’ I say, taking a swig.

‘Is that right?’ he says in a faux-posh voice via The Young Ones.

‘Why yes, Matt, it is.’

‘How’s some, my broe?’

‘Fuck off, get your own,’ I say, as kindly as I can manage. Matt picks up his bag at this and flings it onto the bed, saying ‘Well you sound better than you did on the phone.’ The bag almost makes it but slides off, spilling its contents onto the floor: tapes, books, various brands of cigarettes and a belt.

Matt,Camand I have almost matching canvas bags, distinguished only by the various decaying band names scribbled over them in black biro.  Ian has one too, but his is completely black, except for a patch left on the inside cover, which spells out Robyn.

‘Ask her mum,’ I suggest

‘You ask her,’ replies Matt.

‘How does that work?’

‘Well?’

‘Well, why don’t you askCamto ask her.  She lovesCam.’

‘He won’t.’

‘You won’t know until you ask him, Matt’

‘I’m just here,’ saysCam, lighting a cigarette from his perilous position on the very edge of the very top of Belinda’s bed.

Matt turns and, after staring at him for two seconds, says with a big sigh, ‘Cam, why don’t you do something useful and ask Janice for a beer?’ Then he adds, ‘For me?’

‘Okay,’Camsays, leaning back against the wall.

‘Okay? Just like that?’

‘Just like that, Matt,’ he says, pretending to snap his fingers and then looking confused when they make no sound.  He gets up, Matt takes his cigarette from him, ashes, and everyone watches asCamwalks out the room.

The dogs yap listlessly atCam, and Janice yells out from her bedroom ‘There’s some more of your little black friends at the door, Bel.’

Belinda closes her bedroom door again and turns up the Nina Hagen track.  Jumping up and down, she sings in falsetto, ‘This is again radio Eurovan. My name is Franz Ivanovich Hagen.  And this is the news.’ And she laughs.

15 – Had a Dad

Jesus & Mary Chain – On the wall

Over the music blaring from Belinda’s room we can still hear the monotonous drone of Sam’s scooter, inching its way slowly down Davenport Rd.  Sam still insists on long dresses while riding her 20cc Yamaha, complaining often that no matter how much she tucks the dress under her legs, it always seems to flare out at the least opportune times, flashing the zebra-crossingpublic and causing her to swerve violently.  We have, as a group, suggested jeans as some kind of compromise, but apparently on deaf ears.

No sooner has she arrived than we decide to leave and she has to put her helmet back on and fold her long blonde hair back under it.  Matt jumps on the back, helmetless. They head off to Moore Rd only marginally faster than we can walk.

They do loops, backtracking on us, riding up on the pavement and then moving off again until we meet up at the bus stop under the blooming orange Coral trees opposite Buxton’s centre.

The Saturday night traffic seems to only to add to the still heat. The a capella gear changes and hooting sound flat as an old guitar.

When the Myna bus finally arrives, we make our way to the back seat and wave at Sam behind us. We press our faces against the force-out window until her dress flaps up and she veers dangerously into oncoming traffic. Matt and Cam take it in turns to bus-surf with one of Belinda’s pink stuffed bear in their hands.  I lean back on the long seat, Belinda between my legs redoing my red shoelaces.

We exit the bus near the beach promenade at the corner of West and Gillespie, the cheapest street on the SA monopoly board.  We must have missed a rugby game, Vaalies are everywhere in Northern Transvaal caps, their bellies testing the length of their Springbok jerseys. Cars hiss through the wet streets and tourists jockey for position in the curry shops.  We back up on ourselves, down Brickhill, past the drunks, past homeless base camps set up in recessed doorways, ignoring solicitations of cheap dagga.

Outside the Pig and Whistle, an ambulance wails, hopelessly stuck in the unmoved traffic, deprived of Doppler.  The sign on the door says ‘Wednesday: Ladies Night; Thursday: Wet T-shirt competition; R100 and champagne; Friday Lunch: Steak, Egg and Strips’.

We all move inside, looking nervous, feeling we don’t belong but trying to look like we do.  We quickly commandeer a red booth, at the end, near the toilets, the leather all ripped and raw, suitably devoid of much ceiling light.

Sam shuffles into the booth first, looking uncomfortable.  She’s no sooner in when she tells Matt she wants to go.

‘Hold on,’ he says.  ‘Let’s try get some drinks in, quick.’

‘It’s horrible.  Look at these people,’ she says. No one in the bar is under fifty.  In the next booth along, a dishevelled old couple, probably in their sixties, drink white wine from scoured glasses. His right hand is in bandages and his fingers are seared brown from burns.  The bar is packed with old men on bar stools, smoking and shouting at replays of the earlier game. A humid smoke mezzanine floats at head height. The whole place has a feeling of damp, like the inside hasn’t quite escaped the last rain.

‘Okay, so who’s going to help?’ I ask, leaning over the table, yelling over the Wang Chung and TV abuse.

Ian says he will and asks what we’re going to buy.

‘I don’t think we should be ordering a bunch of different things,’ I say. ‘We should probably just stick with beer.’

‘But I want a whisky,’ he says.

‘Whisky and what?’

‘I don’t know. Coke?’

‘You don’t have whisky and Coke,’ I say. ‘I think you have it with water, or maybe soda or something.’

‘Water?’ he says, sounding sceptical.

‘Yeah.  Best to stick with beer.’

‘What if we got some tequila?’ says Matt.

‘We’re not getting tequila.  How much money have you got anyway?’

Matt digs around in his pockets, pulling out a scrunched up pack of Stuyvesant red, crushed wet matches and some coins, which he counts out on the table.

‘Nine Rand,’ I say.  ‘How much do you think tequila is?’

‘No idea,’ he says, but he looks hopeful.

‘And you still need five to get in tonight,’ I say.

‘Come on,’ says Ian. ‘How long we going to wait for this spastic to figure it out?’

‘Okay,’ I say looking over at the bar. ‘Fifteen minutes of happy hour left. It’s probably R1.80 for a beer.  Who wants one?’ The coins and crumpled notes are collected.

For the seven of us, we agree in the end to get five beers.  Belinda decides the possibility of being caught on her sixteenth birthday is too much and says she’ll steal some of mine instead.

The barman looks unfazed as we squeeze our way in through the geriatric crowd at the bar, giving us the beers, unperturbed by the coinage and stray notes.

We toast Belinda’s birthday, light up cigarettes and wonder whether the self-harmers will be there tonight.

The girls agree that Kris is trouble for Carlie, and the guys reckon the issue is more that he’s from Boksburg and that she should stick with local boys.  ‘Local is lekker,’ says Cam, looking suddenly depressed.  Belinda decides she needs a beer for herself after all. I suggest going up with her but she declines and moves through the crowd towards the bar.

Cam tells us there’s a large protest planned for next week through the streets of Durban, called The Freedom March. He tells us there’s also a national strike so none of the buses will be running.

‘Are you going?’ I ask him.

‘Don’t know, you?’

‘Maybe.  What day?’

‘You’re on the wrong side,’ says Ian.

‘I can’t believe you want to support them,’ says Robyn.  ‘They’ll take over this country if we give them even half a chance.’ And Ian puts his hand gently on her arm and she stops, takes a sip from his beer and sits back.

‘Wednesday.’

‘Wednesday I can do.  Hope it’s better than the ECC one,’ I say. A month earlier, I went on my own to an End Conscription Campaign march near North Beach, which had drawn more police than protesters, and was so middle class and white I felt thoroughly depressed by the time it dispersed orderly at the steps of South Beach police station.

‘Yeah most of those there would have been undercover police anyway. I probably wouldn’t bother next time.’

‘How do you know?’ I ask.

‘Mum works at uni, says Cam. ‘She hears things, you know.’

‘So this one’ll be different?’

‘This is big,’ says Cam.

‘They should get the army in there,’ suggests Ian. ‘Get some tanks in, blow the fuckers all to Kingdom Come. Let God sort them out.’

Belinda storms up to me, tells me we need to go. Now.

‘What happened?’ I ask and she hugs me, still standing.

‘Nothing.  Just let’s go. Please.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Nothing.  Just…,’ she starts. I push her back slightly so I can see her face.

‘Just what?’

‘Just… I think I just got chatted up by my dad.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in years.  I thought he looked familiar.  He was talking to me, asking me where I was going tonight and stuff.’ She looks round at the bar. ’And then I got a smell of him and then… then I kinda knew.  It was him.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Can we go?’

‘Yup,’ I say, sculling what’s left of my beer. I tell the rest of the table ‘We’re off. We’re off, right now.’

16 – I’ve seen that face before

Grace Jones – Libertango

My shirt sticks to my back almost as soon as we get out, the air damp and syrupy.  A yellow police van crawls by in the easing traffic, its windows down, a tanned arm sticks out of the dark interior, yells at us ‘Swart gevaar,’ as we start walking back up into the city.

One lonely star, a Cyclops, probably a satellite, shines overhead looking for its moon.

Even two streets down from Commercial and Stanger we can feel the bass reverberating from Faces.  Once there, we sit cross-legged on a stabilized wagon against the wall, grass growing around its wheels, Via Afrika rattling the blacked-out windows behind us.  From our position we watch the queue slowly move forward. Paying at the door is a guy in a Zimbabwe flag jacket, grey fedora and 14-Hole Docs.  His girlfriend has short peroxide hair, shaved on one side and a long quiff on the other. She has giant, loop earrings and bangles and bracelets up her arm, made from Zulu beads and elephant hair.  I spot Lindy on the other side of the rhino-car with Mike and Claude, drinking out of a two-litre Coke bottle.  She sways and I try not to stare.

People surround the small field outside the club, sitting in groups watching some wretched drunk lurch around the perimeters of a small amphitheatre.  He parks a tiger, walks some more, and throws up again.  The performance has the crowd willing him on and cheering for the next upchuck.

‘It was definitely him?’

‘Yeah, definitely.  I wasn’t even that sure at first. Like I kinda felt it before I knew it.’

‘His smell?’ I say.

‘Yeah something like that.’ She steals my cigarette, ‘Even before he started to talk to me I was right back in the old Cortina with his surfboard sticking out the back window.’

‘When was the last time you saw him,’ I ask, taking my cigarette back and tripping up Ian as he moves towards the queue.

‘I must have been about six, maybe younger.  He bought me a Cabbage Patch doll. Horrible thing.  Kept it under my bed.  But when he started talking, I knew. And then I saw the tattoo under his wrist. Anchor in a drop of water’

‘Yikes,’ I say.

‘I know. All I could think of, was the smell of that wax they use on their boards?’

‘Sexwax,’ I say.

‘That, and the damp reek of his bags when he came back from some surf weekend or week or whatever.’ She leans back into me as I lean up against the wall.

‘When I think of my dad I have that weird thing, too,’ I say.  ‘I think of moth balls and silver polish.’

‘I have this memory,’ she says, ‘of driving − to Lesotho, I think − and passing field after field. Each one separated by a line of trees. And from the back seat of the car, just watching these lines pass by. And then, after one row, there was suddenly this giant Aztec statue, like 50 metres high or something.  This gigantic, angry face.’

Confused, I say ‘In Lesotho?’

‘Ya, I think.  Well, no.  I mean I know it couldn’t have happened.  I know it must be a dream or something but it’s so real. It feels like a memory.’

‘That’s weird,’ I say.

‘It’s so different from anything else I’ve ever dreamt.’

‘You want to see something really scary?’ I quote from Twilight Zone, but she hits me and tells me ‘don’t’ and I settle back and give her a hug.

I say, ‘I get this wave of nausea sometimes when I see certain buildings. They’re almost always the same type. Normally three-storeys high with an external staircase.  In fact, the staircase always sets it off for some strange reason. I can’t figure it out.  I see those stairs and I have this feeling of horror.  Like great waves of sadness. And there is this smell that goes with it, something stale and old, like a box that hasn’t been opened forever.  I don’t know. Does that make any sense?’

‘Not really,’ she says, looking lost.

‘It lasts about three seconds and I can never seem to hold onto it, follow it.’

Belinda throws away the rest of the cigarette and gets up off the wagon, straightening down her short skirt. Hand in Glove starts up. Clubbers head inside, showing their stamps.

‘Do you think they’re real?’ she asks as we head towards the door, Sam, Matt and Cam behind us.

‘What?’

‘These things we remember, but kinda don’t.’

We pay Jose at the door, six-foot-four, big floppy fringe with stoned, kind eyes. The story goes that it was his legs in the ad that sold a million Philips Lady Shave razors.

Close to her, I say ‘I don’t know if they’re real, but they mean something’, but there are so many people and the music is so loud I doubt she hears me.

17 – The Raid

The Cure – 10.15 on a Saturday Night

I’ve been to Faces three times now, but it’s still overwhelming, walking in. There are so many strange-looking people moving on the dance floor to their individual piece of logic, some internal pattern of expression.  Much of the music is completely alien, like nothing I’ve ever heard before. The sheer confronting volume of it makes finding a way to process it unavoidably difficult.

I dance to three songs in a row until I’m exhausted, my shirt stuck fast to my stinging back.  I’m slammed to the floor by twenty-year-olds on the fast tracks. I’m too jumpy for the methodical beats of the Sisters songs, and too concerned about being the only one in black, bouncing to Iggy Pop.

Sitting cross-legged on the stage, I’m not sure whether the others feel this sense of finally belonging, by just being here. That we’re at the core of something beautiful and strange and rare.  Cam almost certainly does.  He watches with an eagerness that suggests he might be starting back-to-back life sentences the next day.  Or maybe it’s just that he feels he’s already done one.  Time stuck in a country that’s warped itself somewhere between Little House on the Prairie and Apocalypse Now. In here, the outside seems closer, the future less defined. Our enduring isolation from the outside world seems less and less enforceable.

Although I didn’t realize it the first two times I came here, this place, this shell of a warehouse with its frugal, minimalist lighting, single strobe and its laconic student-hall bar, has become the first splinter in the solid but dim view I have of my own drab destiny.

By three in the morning, not even the low bass of the dub tracks can keep me awake.  This town is coming like a ghost town. The place has halved its population and it feels like I’ve spent half my life in this room.  We crash on the stage, resting our heads on each other’s legs or bags until the music is suddenly switched off, mid-song.

Helge’s voice falls out of the speakers, low and resigned: ‘Okay people, it’s a raid. The police are here.  Everybody be cool. Relax.’

Wolf whistles resound across the vacant space while the police, in faded blue, walk past Jose.  They wear pale blue caps and army boots, their guns strapped high on their waists.

Alternating red and blue lights flash across the back of their heads.

Helge, the resident DJ, comes down from his booth in the sky.  Joined by Jose, they both talk to the police, who seem bored and tired.  One police, old with oversized and overly thick glasses, yells out to everyone that they’re looking for drugs. Can we all take a seat.  They move slowly around the crowd, left side first. The unfriendly neon above highlights the bare alien walls, concrete floors and black plastic bags taped over the windows. Belinda and I sit up on the stage. I light a cigarette and she straightens her rather dented fringe. The dust-packed ceiling fans slowly annoy the few strips of blue paper and shrivelled balloons left from the club’s first birthday a scant two months back.

Zimbabwe-jacket guy has passed out on a bench opposite us, his girlfriend nowhere to be seen.  Two policemen try to wake him, taking turns to shake him. Tiring, they grab him by the scruff of the jacket, pulling him up into a groggy upright position.

Without much enthusiasm, he tries to swat their hands away, mumbling unconvincing threats.  One holds him steady while the other rummages through his threadbare jacket, pulling box after box of cigarettes from his pockets, all different brands. They empty the boxes, sieving them through their fingers until they form a pile on the floor beneath their regulation boots.  Carefully, they return the six, now empty boxes, back into his pockets, releasing him with a thud back down to the bench.

It takes forever for them to get round to us on the stage. They ask if I smoke and I hand over the virtually empty packet to them, which they also drop on the floor.  The two police grab Belinda’s hands and mine, studying them like gruff mall fortune-tellers. Belinda’s cop, a big Afrikaner with a giant wirebrush moustache asks me how old we are.  I tell him eighteen in a voice that sounds irritatingly high and I blush. Trying for a deeper tone, I try again.

‘We’re eighteen.’

‘The fuck you are’, says Belinda’s cop in a bored, soft voice, still holding her hand. ‘You two can’t be more than sixteen. What school do you go to?’

I say ‘We’ve finished school’, which only makes them laugh.

My cop, young with acne scars down his neck, says to Belinda, ‘Is that right?  So what school do you go to, again?’

She says ‘We’ve finished school.  It’s my birthday today.’

Wirebrush looks at me and I think ‘oh dear’.

He says, ‘Is that right? Let me guess, eighteen, right? Well you’re in luck, birthday girl. We have a present for you later.’ My cop looks at her hands and says ‘Does your mother know where you are, little girl?’

‘Yes,’ is all Belinda says.

‘Does she know you smoke dope?’ says Wirebrush.

Belinda says, ‘What?’

‘Look at your hands, they’re stained brown from smoking necks.’  He pulls her hand around so I can see. My cop drops my hand and moves on down the row.  I look at her hand, seeing nothing.  I tell him I can’t see anything and he says to me, dropping her hand, ‘I’m not surprised. If I see you here again, I’ll bust you. And that’s a promise.’

As they move closer to the door, Matt leans in over Cam and tells me we should go.  I agree and tell Belinda, who says, ‘Janice’s going to find out.  I know she is.’

‘No she won’t,’ I tell her. ‘We can go stay at Cam’s, they won’t say anything.’

She stands up in front of me, hugs me. Over the rising yells outside, punctuated by halting police sirens, she says to me ‘Do you love me?’  The sirens get louder, closer and I think to myself how unfair a question is that?  How it’s not like she’s said she loves me.  Not like we’ve been going out for a full year or had actual sex or anything.  I tell her I’m not sure I know what it is and she hugs me tighter while I blush from how crap that sounds and I notice the flashing of the police lights in a mist coming through the door.

Sam starts coughing, and then I start too, uncontrollable, and Ian jumps up and starts yelling at us, ‘It teargas! They’ve fucking teargased us.’

I grab my thin jersey from my bag and help Belinda tie it around her head, our eyes streaming. I yell at her to run as I take my shirt off.  ‘Meet me at the Workshop.’ Sam, Ian Robyn and Belinda all run off together as I pull my bag over my shoulder and chase them out the door.

Outside, the cloud of teargas covers the yellow police vans, the yelp of sirens almost on top of us. I hurdle a coughing body lying foetal on the grass, noticing him only at the last moment. His hands are on his head, his fingers covered in blood.  As I clear the gas and head towards the mall, I notice the large group of clubbers all gathered to the right yelling abuse at the cops.  We dive through the sparse one-way traffic of Walnut Road and even as we clear the road I can still hear the angry crowd chanting ‘The S.A.P. are here to see ‑ that we all enjoy democracy’ over and over again.