Bedlam Addendum
This is my inheritance. A hovel on a street that looks chewedup, swallowed and shat out in a hurry. I remember when I was a kid things were different. For one I was braver. Me and company used to chase mice that hid in the thicket of an auld recluse’s hedge fence. Now; the company is gone and so are the mice. They moved as soon as – what was then – our suburb was overrun by bigger, hungrier and more invasive vermin: rats on two legs – disregardful people. Them same people have also moved on to some other locus, leaving me nothing but a front room view of ruin.
Lately… wait I’m lying. For as long as I care to recall in the morning my brain is the consistency of a runny egg salad and if it were not for the sulphuric confluence in my gut, I wouldn’t dare open my eyes. Alas. I undress the fuselage on the remnants of last night’s petrol bomb. When I was younger I’d have taken the time to call it a Molotov cocktail. Then like the fairway of Rockey street. I was more self-important than I had to be, more self-indulgent than introspective. I digress. A petrol bomb is fashioned from white wine - the vilest kind you can find, the kind that wasn’t even good enough for thepapsak, the kind the papacy would disavow, the dregs of the dregs – vacuumed sealed together with cane spirit in a disposable plastic container. It’s cheap, it’s dirty, it gets the job done.
Dressing to go out, nowadays, is a feat of heroism, the trumpet call to extract me from my self-imposed exile and go out into the world freshly shaven and scrubbed although my stomach juices are already 90 proof. I wasn’t always bent this way nor did I always get bent this way. There was a time believe it or not when I was young - my drinks were cosmetic, my poise was picture perfect, the spitting image ofKodachrome. I could find and dig the poetry of this place; like the time I found a smouldering mass of burnt make up bags and thought to myself rather confidently “the bonfire of the vanity cases”. I could find the humerus even; outside Uncle’s, see people elbowing each other out the way, every month end, to lie on, sit on, expertly prod couches, mattresses, boudoirs, ottomans all manner of furnishings one can fashion from wood, vinyl, faux pleather and cheap stuffing. Right there on the pavement of a main thoroughfare, like it was in the privacy of a showroom – I’d whistle the tune to a popular furniture outlet as I’d pass… it went something like “you’ve got an uncle in the furniture business…”
I don’t talk with my hands. It’s a gesture often lost on people. I have to suffer the ignominy of Delaylay pleading that I beat her, all because I haven’t bought her a beer ever since I happened upon her snogging a ruffian in the menses bathroom. She thinks I caught her cheating on me. No I didn’t. I chanced upon my own foolishness, that’s all and I took it for what that was. This is Shareworld after all. I wonder what Timothy would have made of her? If he would have looked at her slant eyed (figuratively speaking off course). Ah yes, Shareworld. This is not the name theestablishment was christened but a more befitting nomen or moniker if you will. I didn’t come up with it, but soon as I walked in, I would know why.
I first announced myself here when on a particularly balmy morning I was served a frightfully warm beer after the bar attendant had already taken my money. I saw no use in complaining. Found myself a lone table, lit a cigarette and settled down. I was interrupted mid-conversation with myself by a scurvious looking character; who with his mouth asked but with the rest of his decrepitude, demanded the rest of my (at the time) self-smarting cigarette. I considered blowing him off at length. The time it took to pull enough tar into my lungs to resurface Swaziland’s road network. He didn’t get the hint. He just stood there leering at me. That was one of the times I wish I could arch my eyebrows like old Jack Nicholson.
Our stand-off was getting us nowhere. It was ended when a fellow, I never knew then, came and sat at my table and proffered the louse a Menthol (yuck). The weevil takes the fag without a thanks and joins his kind – in what I guessed at the time was the naughty corner. He tells me that he can see that it’s my first time here, that I am new to the ways, that despite appearances this is Shareworld, people share everything, beer cigarettes, histories, etc. Odiously I retorted that I didn’t share cigarettes, I didn’t share beer with anyone. I thought that ended at that. After a querulous silence and my having managed to stave off nausea ad nauseam choking down the boiler-room temperature beer he walked off. I lit a cigarette, the eyes in the corner light up too. The stranger (as he was then) puts a bottle of beer sweating from a serious cold. In that kind of heat, in that kind of dump; it was unnatural, impossible even. He cracked my bottle open for me with his, then, peeled his open with his teeth, which made me wince. He then told me he considered it un-African to drink alone. I accepted the grog with a sceptical thanks and wondered how he would know how un-African it was or wasn’t seeing that he was Chinese and all. He tells me his name is Timothy and for once in many years I tell a stranger my real name.
He joked once, long before he bit it; that Yeoville was a funny town, there was only one way in, by mistake. And two ways out, either in a hurry or in a casket. I miss his company.Delaylay is staring holes into my kill shot areas. She’s seen that crying, wailing, begging pleading, atoning were getting her nowhere she soon will switch tack, start insulting me, cuss me out serious, talk about my inadequacies, my effeminate love making, my poor hygiene habits, my dirty home. I’d leave but I have to meet with Abdul Ebrahim (concert promoter and logistics). I have made myself a beer shandy, I am enjoying the taste, but I am running dangerously out of lemonade and bitters. It is at times like these I wish I had not stopped smoking. Delaylay is busy whispering into the ear of her conniving sister all the while looking at me fiercely. Her sister comes over and tries to make small. Talk asking if I could just them a wine. The wine story… They were thorough beer guzzlers before Delaylay and I were an item but when they saw what it was I could afford they would wine about how they were ladies and only drank the good stuff: white semi-sweet wine out of glass tumblers, with salty ice. The only good it did them was make them cross their legs.
Abdul arrives, late as usual. He kept telling me now-now, which is as emphatic as it is specific. His name is a misnomer. He is as about as Muslim as a member of the Evangelical Apostolic Missionary of Christ Church Fellowship C.C. can get. He has a customary wife, who has a big forehead. Don’t get me wrong she is beautiful. If there was a pageant for beautiful women with big foreheads, she’d win Miss Universe hands down, even with all those ill-fitting wigs she puts on to try and diminish the proportions of her brow. Ask Abdul what he does and he will tell you he is a businessman. What kind of business, you may wonder. The answer is simply: the kind none of which is yours. We are on our way to my abode. I feel slightly squeamish about letting him see the squalor I live in.Him and his wife keep a neat and tidy place just across from the Yeoville police station. His wife works at a call centre inSandton and tells all her colleagues she lives in Observatory, not even Bellevue east, they probably could afford to live there with all the mechanisations Abdul manoeuvres but he seems nonplussed about it.
We are sitting in my kitchen. I hate the view at the front of the house. He is drinking green tea I managed to find under the sink next to a dolls head and rusted pot scourers. I disguised my cane with a raspberry-flavoured carbonated drink, none too well but it is the thought that counts. We are here because he has contacts in shipping. I am the executor of Timothy’s estate. I have to send all his belongings, and his remains back to his homeland, Korea. Abdul looks at the various things, sees I’ve kept the valuable electronics and furniture for myself and quotes me an exorbitant fee, which I promptly tell him I am unable to pay. He rubs his razor bumped chin and says we’ll make a deal, because he understands what it is like to lose a friend who doesn’t belong here. What that deal entails and whether I will have to part with my soul I don’t know, I lost track of things when I got bored with him counting and recounting the boxes. The Stroh rum I had settled was slowly drawing the curtains over my eyes, when he answered a call and told me he had to leave quickly for a deal at the airport…
