Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

I remember the first time she brought it up. It had just started raining outside, and she’d got up half-naked from the mattress we three sometimes shared. It was close to midnight and the room had cloaked itself in complete darkness. I waited a while, then joined her on the wooden floor. I guess neither of us was in a rush to get up again. We took our time, sitting in silence, and the first gray light fingered its way through the slits between her blinds.

Then, before getting up to shower, I guess having proved her point through silence, Cissie said I check the time a lot when people tell me their problems. In response, I told her I’d work on it. Then I looked at my wristwatch. I guess I’m still working on it.

Even so, while I fail to live up to Cissie’s standards for human sympathy, I have a friend who’s even worse off than I am. His name is Ruan, and he loses no sleep over that sort of thing. I know this because I’ve asked him about it.

I mean really. You should hear Ruan speak.

He’s our resident printer here at West Ridge. To print out as much ink as he does, you need to buy a regular 60XL cartridge, then take it home and print until it reaches half its capacity. Then steam it open and loosen the blade above the chemical toner. Report this as a defect to the manufacturer, add an image for evidence, and print out their response to take back to the shop for a new pack. Most ink companies will corroborate your story like this by accident. Corporations lose nothing in providing customer care to a single claim from a foreign client. What helps, of course, is to know how to lie as often and as easily as Ruan does.

I watch him lean his head back on Cissie’s couch. He has a five-o’clock shadow that runs down half the length of his throat, and his Adam’s apple bobs up and down as the printer chugs, pulling in reams of paper ready for all the ink he’s defrauded from Cape Town’s shop assistants.

This makes us up as a total. You count these two and add me. We make up a team of three, and these days, if you want to know what passes for my social life, just take a look at them, at Ruan and Cecelia.

I know I haven’t said much about Ruan yet. For years now, and maybe even before that, Ruan and I have considered ourselves the closest thing we might ever get to kin. I guess that’s worked out for me in the end, and maybe for him, too, whenever it needs to. Getting to know him, what you learn first is never to believe anything he says, and what you learn second is that whenever he’s high, he’ll tell you that his first near-death experience was a download.

I’m not making that up.

Meet him and he’s probably coming down or high. The three of us don’t manage to stay in between for too long. Ruan will tell you that since he started feeding his plants with the new fertilizer he ordered online, the pigeons have been coming to his flat more than ever. If you listen to him, he’ll tell you how these birds travel all the way down from the Philippines and stop over at Maine before they circle back to his windowsill in Sea Point. When I first started to know him, Ruan and I spent a lot of time talking about these birds. He told me he was an asthmatic and introverted child, and that what he knew about bird migrations wasn’t from taking a lot of trips to the museum. He told me and Cissie how much these birds meant to him, and even though we didn’t understand, we believed him.

Then lastly, there’s me.

In case you’ve been wondering, I was also given a name. My parents got mine from a girl. My mother had a friend who almost went blind from working in a clothing factory in the seventies. They’d both been students at Lovedale College before my mother moved on to Fort Hare, and when they reunited again, years later, under the dome of an East London factory shop, the friend was mending clothes to put her daughter Lindanathi through school. I suppose that child, listless in a corner, wearing knee-length socks and wielding a bag full of textbooks, became a sign of hope for my mother. She convinced my father to give me the same name.

Lindanathi means “wait with us.” What I’m meant to be waiting for, or who I’m meant to be waiting with, I was never told.

It’s just what my name is.

I’m Nathi, and of the three of us, I’m the one who’s supposed to be dying. In order to do as much standing around as I do, you need to be one of the forty million human beings currently infected with the immunodeficiency virus. Then you need to stand at your friend’s computer and design a poster over his shoulder, one telling these people you’re here to help them. Then you need to provide them with your details — tell them you prefer email or SMS — and then start selling them your pills.

What helps, of course, is to try to forget about it as much as possible. Which is what I do.

Maybe it’s this whole slavery thing, Cissie says.

Leaning on her balcony, I try to press reply on my cellphone, but my fingers pause over the buttons. They feel like paper straws. I stare at the blinking cursor.

In the kitchen, Cissie stirs another ladle of water into the glue. This morning, her braids are rolled up in a neat ball at the top of her head, a new style the three of us have started to favor more and more for her. When she moves, a few of the strands loosen and fall like tassels across her chest, and she flicks them away from the stove in a single shake with her shoulders. Cissie has a way of making the smallest things obey her, and I guess that includes me and Ruan.

I put my cellphone away. These days, she’s always wearing a different pack of synthetic hair on her head. Sometimes the color she chooses is black, at other times it’s a blue shade, and at other times it’s this color I can’t even describe to you — like silver or aqua or teal or something. Ruan and I have seen her in the red and blonde ones a lot. Cissie wears them on her head all day and all of them, she says, are more flammable than a wick dipped in paraffin. She tells us to think of her as a human match, with a dormant fire ready to burst into flame between her brains, which is a nice way of telling people not to fuck with you. Or at least the nicest way I’ve heard.

I can feel my cellphone’s weight against my thigh. Leaning back on the railing, I push out three slow breaths for composure. Out on the balcony, the weather changes faces. Spring is stalling, still a month away, but the sun’s rays warm up my skin like geyser water. They throw dappled light across the empty corridor.

Ruan and I have been squatting here for the past few nights, somewhere between falling asleep and overdosing on Cissie’s couch. Cissie’s building, this unattractive cream-colored six-story called West Ridge Heights, was converted from an old ground-level nursing home in the late eighties. It sits tucked away in Newlands, a docile suburb, just a few streets off the main road, and it’s one of the two holes Ruan and I have chosen to call our homes, this year. Or maybe just for the winter, if you want to take Ruan’s view of things.

In any case, this is where Cissie cooks her glue for us. You take a look and the building has the usual overgrown grass, the usual stained ceilings, and the usual dirty lino in its single-lift lobby. There’s a tile missing here and there, with a broken full-length mirror and plastic potted plants leaning back in most of its corners. There isn’t much security to speak of, and below, on the ground floor, there’s a young girl who plays by herself in a small courtyard, building cities with loose pieces of concrete from the broken water fountain. I always wave at her when Ruan and I come over to crash. Often, she just looks up and stares at me with vacant eyes. Then she runs back under the awning and disappears into places I can’t imagine from up here on the fourth. In between these encounters, I’ve learned her name is Ethelia.