Zoë Wicomb - You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town

‘Don’t stand there like a stuffed owl in the dark; get some light into this place,’ he bellowed at Mamma, and heehaw, he threw back his head in appreciation of his simile.

When he left with a screech of wheels, Mamma coaxed the curtains back across the window and the feverish diamonds glowed like rubies in the afternoon sun. I drifted off to the sound of the turkey cock dragging his boastful wing in the dust. Otherwise such silence that I knew the hens had resolutely tucked their heads under their wings.

‘Yes, I’ll make an appointment,’ I agreed.

Father looked up startled and his arm slackened so that the fowl leapt down with a deafening cackle.

‘I don’t think you can make appointments, not yet. This isn’t Cape Town, you know. You just go along and wait. But there’s a lovely waiting room with a modern water lavatory.’

‘Oh, I don’t know that I want to spend the day waiting for Dr van Zyl to tell me that I have bronchitis.’

‘Why not? You’re on holiday and no one minds waiting for a doctor. Your health, my girlie, is as important as your books. Anyway, you can always take something along to read. Doctor will make a proper diagnosis and give you some antibiotics to clear it up. And the waiting room’s nice and clean and modem, no need to spoil your best clothes sitting in the dust.’

I heard again Mamma’s voice as she slapped the sewing out of my hands. ‘No backstitching on a hem, you careless child. You’ll just have to start again; nice girls don’t do slovenly needlework.’ And the snip-snip of the scissors as they lifted a square from the perfectly new dress she drew out of the trunk. Sprigs of yellow mimosa, the furry edges of pollen dust drifting into the cream of the muslin.

‘Start on the plain edge,’ she snapped and sat down with her hawk’s eye trained on my stitches. But the stuff, a heap of crushed mimosa, rilled under her rings as her fingers plucked nervously at it. So that I dared to say, ‘It’s nice, why don’t you want it any more?’

‘I wore it once,’ she said, ‘spent the whole day making it and wore it the very next day when I woke with an asthma attack. I couldn’t stand there waiting, felt too bad, so I lay down right there in Dr van Zyl’s yard.’ She pushed the dress away. ‘It’s stained, all along the right side,’ and her mouth twisted into lines of disgust as she tossed the dress into the trunk. ‘A decent chap, van Zyl, said, “Make way for the old girl,” and saw me first that afternoon.’

So we alighted on the same scene of Mamma’s heaving chest and the articulated pride of her lowered eyes as she sank to the ground.

I had been home a week, a whole week in which we struggled like tourists in a market place. Now those words that trailed off in tentative dots melted in the moment of a shared past. So fragile a moment that I snapped.

‘I don’t want antibiotics and I dress entirely for my own pleasure. If I had best clothes I would certainly not reserve them for an uncouth old white man.’

He blinked, once, twice, uncomprehendingly, and I should have explained that there was no point in pampering a memory embedded in lies. Perhaps he winced at the rehearsed quality of my words. But so sadly did he clutch the salt container with both hands, and replaced it so gingerly that it toppled in the dust and the little blue Cerebos man’s demented smile grew wise in the somersault, so that I said, ‘Oh, I’ll go and see van Zyl tomorrow.’ He smiled gratefully, a child placated by a parent’s exasperated, Yes, all right.

I watch two girls sharing a photo-story. Their practised eyes meet as they reach the end of the page simultaneously. It will take no time at all to finish the book but I note a further supply poking out of a bag; they have come well armed for waiting. So far there has been no indication that anyone is aware of our presence in the yard. Have the two in the waiting room been receiving whispered messages from a nurse whose starched head would just pop around a door with an earnest, ‘Doctor won’t be long’?

I toy again with the idea of reading my book but my hand in the bag is arrested by the faltering sound of a young man limping into the yard. He takes no care in avoiding the bougainvillea so that the blossoms tremble afresh in his wake. He stops and only his eyes move to register the group, scooping up even the stragglers in a single swivelled beam. His face is covered with dust so evenly spread as to beguile the casual observer. He jerks his shoulder to adjust a green khaki strap and he pats the bag briefly as if to ascertain the contents. Then he walks briskly into the waiting room. I hear the stuff of his trousers on the plastic chair as he settles into a position of comfort. The silence of the room swallows him. Where will he be sitting? Next to the man whose feet will clench suspiciously around the briefcase; whose eyes will accuse him of dissembling? For what has become of his limp? Will the woman’s nostrils curl at the acrid smell of perspiration? The roots of my hair tingle as the stranger’s face grows before me, the close-up magnified into a distorted mountain of flesh. Into the great caverns of the flared nostrils I, an awe-struck Gulliver, peer and tremble at the fire that the inhalations promise. Waves of heat skid in silver sign-curves across the black flesh and I must blink, no, rub my fists into my eyes to clear the screen.

As if to recover his place, the stranger stumbles out of the waiting room. His lips move in a mutter of inarticulate sounds as he swings his body down on to the ground, almost blocking the doorway. From his right pocket he draws a pair of dark glasses and simultaneously from the left a dazzling white handkerchief with which he carefully polishes the lenses. He puts them on and, as if to test their efficacy, aims straight at me. In the round mirror glass I see my face bleached by an English autumn, the face of a startled rabbit, and I drop my eyes. I burrow in my bag for a book and allow it to fall open. Under that gaze I cannot allow my hands to tremble while searching for the correct page.

I read, ‘The right side was browner than a European’s would be, yet not so distinctly brown as to type him as a Hindu or Pakistani and certainly he was no Negro, for his features were quite as Caucasian as Edward’s own.’

These words are sucked off the page by the mirrors and I flush with shame and put my arm across the print. I know that the cover is safely pressed against my lap but I fear for the reflection of light, beams criss-crossing and backtracking and depositing their upside-down images God knows where. The mirrors twitch knowingly. Had I been careless in taking the book out?

The parched soul will be nourished by literature, say the moral arbiters. And I have become their willing slave. Nevertheless I ought to challenge this man who stares so unashamedly. Am I not here precisely because I am tired of being stared at by the English? Please God, I can bear no more scrutiny. Guiltily I stuff the novel back into my bag and drop my head on to my knees.

Last winter it rained and rained. From the window I had been watching the lurid yellow of oil-seed rape sag like sails under squalls of rain. On the beam in the kitchen drops of rain lined up at regular intervals, the bright little drops meeting their destruction in an ache for perfection, growing to roundness that the light from the bare electric bulb would catch, so that the star at the base grew into a hard bright point of severance and for a second was the perfect crystal sphere before it fell, ping, into the tin plate and splattered into mere wetness. But then, just then, before the fall, the star would spread into an oval of reflected light, pale and elliptical on the shadowed beam, an opal ghost escaping.

I watched them in turn, knees hugged, and listened to the symphony of perfect drops splattering into the receptacles arranged in a line below the beam. Individual drops tapped a morse message of conciliation that belied the slanted drone of rain outside.