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

Young men in Sunday ties and borrowed cars agreed to take me with them on scenic drives along the foot of Table Mountain, or Chapman’s Peak where we looked down dizzily at the sea. And I tactfully wandered off licking at a jumbo ice-cream while they practised their kissing, Moira’s virginity unassailable. Below, the adult baboons scrambled over the sand dunes and smacked the bald bottoms of their young and the sunlicked waves beckoned at the mermaids on the rocks.

Desmond replies, ‘Martin’s fallen in love with an AZAPO woman, married her and stopped coming round. Shall we say that he finally lost interest in Moi?’

The whisky in his glass lurches amber as he rolls the stem between his fingers.

‘Would you like a Coke?’ he asks.

I decline but I long to violate the alcohol taboo for women. ‘A girl who drinks is nothing other than a prostitute,’ Father said. And there’s no such thing as just a little tot because girls get drunk instantly. Then they hitch up their skirts like the servant girls on their days off, caps scrunched into shopping bags, waving their Vaaljapie bottles defiantly. A nice girl’s reputation would shatter with a single mouthful of liquor.

‘The children are back from their party,’ Moira says. There is a shuffling outside and then they burst in blowing penny whistles and rattling their plastic spoils. Simultaneously they reel off the events of the party and correct each other’s versions while the youngest scrambles on to his mother’s lap. Moira listens, amused. She interrupts them, ‘Look who’s here. Say hallo to the auntie. Auntie Frieda’s come all the way from England to see you.’ They compose their stained faces and shake hands solemnly. Then the youngest bursts into tears and the other two discuss in undertones the legitimacy of his grievance.

‘He’s tired,’ Desmond offers from the depths of his whisky reverie, ‘probably eaten too much as well.’

This statement has a history, for Moira throws her head back and laughs and the little boy charges at his father and butts him in the stomach.

‘Freddie, we’ve got a visitor, behave yourself hey,’ the eldest admonishes.

I smile at her and get up to answer the persistent knock at the back door which the family seem not to hear. A man in overalls waiting on the doorstep looks at me bewildered but then says soberly, ‘For the Missus,’ and hands over a bunch of arum lilies which I stick in a pot by the sink. When I turn round Moira stands in the doorway watching me. She interrupts as I start explaining about the man.

‘Yes, I’ll put it in the children’s room.’

I want to say that the pot is not tall enough for the lilies but she takes them off hurriedly, the erect spadices dusting yellow on to the funnelled white leaves. Soon they will droop; I did not have a chance to put water in the pot.

I wait awkwardly in the kitchen and watch a woman walk past the window. No doubt there is a servant’s room at the far end of the garden. The man must be the gardener but from the window it is clear that there are no flowers in the garden except for a rampant morning glory that covers the fence. When Moira comes back she prepares grenadilla juice and soda with which we settle around the table. I think of alcohol and say, ‘It’s a nice kitchen.’ It is true that sunlight sifted through the lace curtains softens the electric blue of the melamine worksurfaces But after the formality of the sitting room the clutter of the kitchen comes as a surprise, the sink is grimy and harbours dishes of surely the previous day. The grooved steel band around the table top holds a neat line of grease and dust compound.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I like it. The living room is Desmond’s. He has no interest in the kitchen.’

And all the while she chops at the parsley, slowly chops it to a pulp. Then beneath the peelings and the spilled contents of brown paperbags she ferrets about until she drags out a comb.

‘Where the hell are the bay leaves?’ she laughs, and throws the comb across the worksurface. I rise to inspect a curious object on the windowsill from which the light bounces frantically. It is a baby’s shoe dipped into a molten alloy, an instant sculpture of brassy brown that records the first wayward steps of a new biped. I tease it in the sunlight, turning it this way and that.

‘Strange object,’ I say, ‘whose is it?’

‘Ridiculous hey,’ and we laugh in agreement. ‘Desmond’s idea,’ she explains, ‘but funnily enough I’m quite attached to that shoe now. It’s Carol’s, the eldest; you feel so proud of the things your child does. Obvious things, you know, like walking and talking you await anxiously as if they were man’s first steps on the moon and you’re so absurdly pleased at the child’s achievement. And so we ought to be, not proud I suppose, but grateful. I’m back at work, mornings only, at Manenberg, and you should see the township children. Things haven’t changed much, don’t you believe that.’

She picks up the shoe.

‘Carol’s right foot always leaned too far to the right and Desmond felt that that was the shoe to preserve. More character, he said. Ja,’ she sighs, ‘things were better in those early days. And anyway I didn’t mind his kak so much then. But I’d better get on otherwise dinner’ll be late.’

I lift the lace curtain and spread out the gathers to reveal a pattern of scallops with their sprays of stylised leaves. The flower man is walking in the shadow of the fence carrying a carrierbag full of books. He does not look at me holding up the nylon lace. I turn to Moira bent over a cheese grater, and with the sepia light of evening streaming in, her face lifts its sadness to me, the nutbrown skin, as if under a magnifying glass, singed translucent and taut across the high cheekbones.

‘Moira,’ I say, but at that moment she beats the tin grater against the bowl.

So I tug at things, peep, rummage through her kitchen, pick at this and that as if they were buttons to trigger off the mechanism of software that will gush out a neatly printed account of her life. I drop the curtain still held in my limp hand.

‘What happened to Michael?’ she asks.

‘Dunno. There was no point in keeping in touch, not after all that. And there is in any case no such thing as friendship with men.’ I surprise myself by adding, ‘Mind you, I think quite neutrally about him, even positively at times. The horror of Michael must’ve been absorbed by the subsequent horror of others. But I don’t, thank God, remember their names.’

Moira laughs. ‘You must be kinder to men. We have to get on with them.’

‘Yes,’ I retort, ‘but surely not behind their backs.’

‘Heavens,’ she says, ‘we were so blarry stupid and dishonest really. Obsessed with virginity, we imagined we weren’t messing about with sex. Suppose that’s what we thought sex was all about: breaking a membrane. I expect Michael was as stupid as you. Catholic, wasn’t he?’

I do not want to talk about Michael. I am much more curious about Desmond. How did he slip through the net? Desmond scorned the methods of her other suitors and refused to ingratiate himself with me. On her first date Moira came back with a headache, bristling with secrecy no doubt sworn beneath his parted lips. We did not laugh at the way he pontificated, his hands held gravely together as in prayer to prevent interruptions. Desmond left Cape Town at the end of that year and I had in the meantime met Michael.

There was the night on the bench under the loquat tree when we ate the tasteless little fruits and spat glossy pips over the fence. Moira’s fingers drummed the folder on her lap.

‘Here,’ she said in a strange voice, ‘are the letters. You should just read this, today’s.’

I tugged at the branch just above my head so that it rustled in the dark and overripe loquats fell plop to the ground.