Masande Ntshanga - The Reactive

The three of us knit our way through the stream of daytime traffic. In the sky above, the day’s gone full gray, but still holds on to an ember of its heat. Ruan and Cissie don’t say much. We share another cigarette as we weave through the shoppers, hawkers and gaartjies. Then we turn down a one-way that leads us to the clinic.

The clinic is this white building with a low green fence and a face-brick finish. Ruan and Cissie walk around the boom gate and I follow a step behind. We make our way down to the basement, where they’ve added extra light fixtures to the ceiling. It surprises me, to see how much brighter the place looks. They’ve painted the walls, and my vision takes a moment to adjust.

We take our seats on plastic chairs set up in a circle in the middle of the space, waiting for the session to begin. Mary, our red-haired counselor, sits on a plastic chair opposite the three of us, a halo from the fluorescents sketching a delicate crown around her Technicolor bob.

I close my eyes for a while.

Sitting in group, everything bears a trace of what you’ve seen before. I remember how once, when we were ten years old, my brother and I visited my grand-aunt in King William’s Town. It was summer, and one Saturday morning we stole out to Candies and Novelties, a small store hidden behind the town’s post office. We were looking for firecrackers. For most of that summer, my brother and I had scoured the town to find thick black widows we could stuff into Cherry Coke cans. We had a plan to set them up as booby traps for the town pigeons.

Inside the store, we spent some time in front of the shop counter, smudging it with fingerprints as we ogled the TV-game cartridges on display. Then we went up and down the aisles, drinking in all the toys we could never afford.

Luthando and I took two different aisles at a time, heading out in opposite directions, and it wasn’t long before a woman who looked like Mary called out to us. She had Mary’s skin and hair. When she demanded to know what we wanted, we told her we were just browsing, and she said we could do that from outside.

I was used to it and said nothing, but after we left, Luthando wanted to go back inside and spit on her forehead. It was pale and as large as a bed sheet, he told me, and I laughed, but I stopped him. I’d been warned by my mother. We were to act like visitors in my grand-aunt’s town.

Cissie touches my knee and shakes me awake. When I open my eyes, I find Neil talking to his feet. My mouth feels scorched and my hands are damp. I crane my neck to take a better look at him.

With Neil, I guess there isn’t much to say. He’s a former math teacher from a gated estate in Westlake. He’s been divorced twice and has rails on both of his arms, the result of a heroin habit that followed from years of blow. He taught private school for thirteen years, he says, and maybe that’s the reason no one likes him here. I’ve heard some of the older members say he won’t make it through the year, and if you look at him, that isn’t hard to believe. This comes from the old users, mostly. Guys from a clinic in Diep River, and one from Strand. They look at him and shake their heads.

Today, Neil’s dressed in a short-sleeved flannel shirt tucked into a pair of pressed chinos. He’s a thin guy, with a gnawed coat-hanger for a frame, and his hair is dark and matted, hanging low enough to touch his shoulders. He’s wearing a crucifix around his neck, and above it a pair of broad-framed glasses, each lens flashing under the basement’s new fluorescent lights.

Like most addicts, Neil has an excuse for each time he feels his life cracking open. Today, he wants a mass deportation of all the illegal immigrants in Cape Town. We should start off with the Nigerians, he tells us, and follow it up with the Somalis.

I look over and find Cissie rolling her eyes.

Out of the three of us, Cissie’s the one Neil bores the most. I remember how she once asked us why he didn’t just get HIV already. Maybe it was an awful thing to say, but Ruan and I laughed because it was true. Even though Neil’s a serf in his community, he’s a nobleman in ours. We could’ve pulled a lot of money out of him.

Neil has these long, bony hands that flop around him when he speaks, and today, he has one of them girded in a bright spotted bandage. He waves it and tells us he cut himself with a lolly —an old glass pipe he’s never changed since buying his first straw — and that he passed out on his kitchen floor. Raising his other hand, he tells us he’s managed to keep away from the ice this week.

Then Mary thanks him and the rest of us nod.

I guess this isn’t really dramatic.

If anything, Neil’s brought our drug talk forward by an hour and a half, and when Olive stands up to speak next, it seems this trend might persist for the rest of our session.

Olive suffers from an undiagnosed respiratory obstruction, and on occasion it clogs the walls of her larynx, causing her breath to make a racket on its way out. I can hear the air pushing out from her throat, a wheeze that reaches me from six members away. Maybe it’s a song, a whistle of the damage she carries inside her, or maybe it’s just human wear: the kind we all have, waiting to waylay us.

Like most places filled with the sick and the dying, there’s always an opportunity to learn something about being a person here. Our parking lot turns into an academy at times, and we get educated on the survival of people like Leonardo and people like Linette, on people like Neil and people like Olive. Maybe it’s best for me to forget my own troubles and grow a greater sympathy for others. Like Cecelia, this could be what Bhut’ Vuyo wants from me.

During my time here, I’ve learned everything there is to know about Olive. Her last name is De Villiers, and she was born to pious Presbyterians, a young couple rooted in a community church in Maitland. Her family clipped its extensions to preserve its piety, and as an only child, Olive grew up with an urgent need to see other people. Her teenage years were split between Hanover and Grassy Park, and she says she watched her friends breathing out thick white plumes for years before she joined them at sixteen. She’s a single mother now, headed towards the end of her thirties, and she has the kind of hard but pleasant face you often see in women from the Flats. She works as a soup-kitchen cook at a backyard orphanage in Lavender Hill, and when she stands up to talk, every story she tells us circles the same subject. It’s about her struggle to form a relationship with Emile, her son and only child.

He’s just a child, she says. I know, I know, but he’s starting to make out that everything I do is a gemors. I can sommer hear it in the way the child speaks to me when I visit my parents and they have people over.

Olive’s dressed in black today. She has on a ribbed polo-neck sweater and a sea-colored doek that holds her dreadlocks in a neat parting. Her hair’s pushed back into two thick columns that fall away in rolling curves behind her ears, and her dreadlocks are tinted a color that, depending on the kind of day you’re having, reminds you of either sunset or rust.

Today, I can’t help it.

I fill up with an image of bursting pipes.

Inside my pocket, I release my cellphone. Then I knead my knuckles and crack them. I decide to circle my thoughts around

Olive.

The worst day she ever had as a user, she’s told us, began when she forgot her son’s name. She tried to ask him for it, putting on a wide smile to throw him off guard, but she could tell he knew. Olive couldn’t recall the three years in which she’d met Emile’s father, in which Emile had been conceived, and in which she’d given birth to him. It had all disappeared, she said, and she’d had to watch her son growing up without her smell, knowing only the instruction of his grandparents.