insane. What was he going to do?
?Where can I get hold of you? If I hear something??
?I will come back.?
The Boss Man?s little eyes narrowed. ?You don?t trust me??
?I trust nobody.?
The little laugh bubbled up, champagne from a barrel, and a marshmallow hand patted him on the shoulder. ?Well said, my friend . . .?
There was a crash louder than the music. The dancing dragon?s table had broken beneath him and he fell spectacularly, to the great enjoyment of the onlookers. He lay on the floor holding his beer glass triumphantly above him.
?Fuck,? said the Boss Man and got up from the stool. ?I knew things would get out of hand.?
The colored man stood up slowly and gestured an apology in Madikiza?s direction. He nodded back with a forced smile.
?He will pay for the table, the shit.? He turned to Thobela. ?Do you know who that is??
?No idea.?
?Enver Davids. Yesterday he walked away from a baby rape charge. On a technicality. Fucking police misplaced his file, can you believe it?a genuine administrative fuck-up; you don?t buy your way out of that one. He?s more bad news than the
General of the Twenty-Sevens. He got AIDS in jail from a
More cell time than Vodacom, and they parole him and he goes and rapes a baby, supposed to cure his AIDS . . . Now he comes and drinks here, because his own people will string him up, the fucking filthy shit.?
?Enver Davids,? said Thobela slowly.
?Fucking filthy shit,? said the Boss Man again, but Thobela was beyond hearing. Something was beginning to make sense. He could see a way forward.
His hands trembled on the steering wheel. They had a life of their own. He felt cold in the warm summer night and he knew it was withdrawal. He knew it was beginning?it was going to be a terrible night in the flat of Josephine Mary McAllister.
He reached out to the radio, locating the knob with difficulty, and pressed it. Music. He kept the volume low. At this time of night Sea Point?s streets were alive with cars and pedestrians, people going somewhere with purpose. Except for him.
They had made a circle around him once everyone was finished. They gathered around him, touched him as if to transfer something to him through their hands. Strength. Or belief? Faces, too many faces. Some faces told a story in the rings around their eyes and mouths, like the rings of a tree. Heartbreaking stories. Others were masks hiding secrets. But the eyes, all the eyes were the same?piercing, glowing with willpower, like someone in floodwaters hanging on to a thin green branch. He will see, they said. He will see. What he did see was that he was part of The Last Chance Club. He felt the same desperation, the same dragging floodwaters.
The tremor ran through him like a fever. He could hear their voices and he turned the music up. Rhythm filled the car. Louder. Rock, Afrikaans, he tried to follow the words.
Too much synthesizer, he thought, not quite right, but good.
He parked in front of the block of flats, but didn?t get out. He allowed his fingers to run down the imaginary neck of a base guitar?that?s what the song needed, more base. Lord, it would be good to hold a base guitar again. The trembling limb jerked to a rhythm all of its own and made him want to laugh out loud.
Nostalgia. Where were the days, where was the twenty-year-old little fucker who throttled a base guitar in the police dance band until the very walls shook?
Emotion. His eyes burned. Fuck, no, he wasn?t a crybaby. He banged the radio off, opened the door and got out fast, so he could get away from this place.
11.
The minister wondered if she was telling the whole truth?he searched between her words and in her body language. He could see the anger, old and new, the involuntary physical self-consciousness. The continuous, practiced offering of mouth, breasts and hair. Her eyes had a strange shape, almost oriental. And they were small. Her features were not delicate, but had an attractive regularity. Her neck was not thin, but strong. Her gaze sometimes skittered away as though she might betray something: a thirst for acceptance? Or was there something rotten? Or spoilt, like a child still wanting her own way, craving attention and respect, an ego feeding on alternating current?now brave, now incredibly fragile.
Fascinating.
He phoned his wife just after ten, when he knew she would have had her bath and would be sitting on their bed with her dressing gown pulled above her knees smoothing cream on her legs, and then turning to the mirror and doing the same to her face with delicate movements of her fingertips. He wanted to be there now to watch her do it, because his memories of that were not recent.
?I am sober,? was the first thing he said.
