Читать книгу The Fall - Jen Thorpe - Страница 8

Noné

I won’t allow anything to get in the way of my launch on Friday – especially not a bunch of quasi-intellectual student activists. They’ve chosen the wrong president to picket against.

I’m exhausted. Being stressed like this is enough to make anyone tired – thixo wam! The usual Facebook quiz hasn’t helped me feel any better, especially not when it says a meerkat is my spirit animal. Unlikely, Facebook! I’m a hunter, through and through.

I hear the door creak open, and Alice marches in.

‘Your schedule, Your Excellency. And I’ve made you a smoothie and lined up your vitamins on this tray. You need to stay nourished. Now, here are today’s documents. Sign here, and here. Right, that’s POPI and CLARA. The rest of the day isn’t too busy, mostly calls and a few commissions of inquiry to authorise.’

‘Cancel the calls.’

‘Yes, Your Excellency.’

‘So, in terms of the inquiries, we have mining, and mental health hospitals, and …’

Alice carries on while I nod and try to concentrate. She’s immaculately dressed as always, in a teal two-piece suit, the seams of her stockings running up her slender legs. I suck in my stomach, but it doesn’t stay in like it used to. My body isn’t curvy in the right places any more, and where it should be soft and smooth, it’s now firm and textured. Unlike her perfect forehead, mine is lined like a mountaintop laced with footpaths and trails.

This job has taken my youth. It feels like it’s taking the last bit of energy I have. Even my nails are tatty.

I slip my feet out of the heels I’ve squashed them into, feeling the blood rush back to the parts that were compressed, leaving them itching. Alice is still talking, and I’m distracted by the length of her eyelashes the way someone might be distracted by peacock feathers – so glamorous and yet so over the top.

‘Alice, that’s enough about today, thank you. I’ll get to those inquiries later. It’s not like they’re urgent. Instead, I’d like to start putting some ideas down on paper for my speech on Friday. When can you have those to me?’

‘When can I have what, Your Excellency?’

‘The ideas, Alice. The ideas. I think if you can get them down by two pm, then I can approve them or tweak them this afternoon.’

‘Certainly, Your Excellency. I’ll do my best.’

She looks at me with what must be awe, then slinks out of my office, panther-like. I’m alone at my desk once more, alone with the burden of running this country.

I remember how I used to feel sitting here. I used to love this desk. Its grand, thick wood and glossy finishes. Now it feels like a prison. I’m imprisoned by my service to my people. I look at the folders of documents that I’m forced to spend my time reading and signing, day in, day out. Some of the folders are gathering dust. Forgotten, surely. I push them over the edge and into the bin.

The heat here doesn’t help. You can see it rising off the lawn behind the police officers outside my window. I close my eyes for just a moment, and when I open them again I realise I must have nodded off. The folders from the bin have been dusted and replaced on my desk, and in place of my smoothie is a tall glass of iced tea and a salad. The vitamins remain, staring at me from the tray.

‘Alice!’ She shouldn’t come in here and rearrange my things – not when I’m sleeping.

‘Alice!’

She must have gone out for lunch. I must eat alone. Again. At least I see she’s also left me some notes for my speech. I take a bite of the lemony chicken from my salad, and read while I eat.

As president, one both inherits a legacy, and must leave one behind. As South Africans, our legacy is complex. When our government came to power back in 1994, there was no way we could have known the extent of the solutions we would need to provide. So much of the rot was hidden, so much of the evidence thrown into the furnaces in the final days of apartheid. We believed we would be able to change everything – we were all twenty years younger.

She’s made a good start. But I can’t have words like ‘rot’ in my speech. It’s important to stay positive, and not to give the media any ideas.

We had to begin with bailing out the water that was holding us down before we could begin with the sailing. In many cases we are still trying to salvage the wreckage.

No, no, no, Alice. Wreckage? That’s far too negative. This ship isn’t sinking yet.

Twenty years might seem like a long time but it is hardly any time at all. Our democracy is just behaving like the young adult it is, temperamental, trying to set its own path, ignoring the advice of its elders. All teenagers and young adults rebel. We must stay the course. Good things take time, and even South Africa is not an exception.

Better. It sounds strong. Of course, we wanted to be the exception, and admitting defeat is not an option. It’s far too late to be making practical statements when we’ve made bold ones for so long. I make a note for her to mention something around stormy waters.

We might be growing up as a country, but the youth of this country is the real thorn in our side. They are impatient, want everything done immediately, wouldn’t have survived a minute in the real struggle, with their glossy phones and clean tackies and perfect head wraps. They know nothing about how long change takes.

‘Your Excellency?’ Alice calls from the next room.

‘Oh, Alice, I’m glad you’re back … I was thinking about this part here with the boat—’

‘My apologies, Your Excellency, but the Minister of Higher Education is on line one.’

‘Tell him I’m busy.’

‘Of course.’

There’s nothing new to discuss with him anyway. We’ve been through this all before. We’re not reducing the fees to make it easier for more of them to learn. The more they learn, the more trouble they make. In any case, the students are a minority – hardly anyone gets to go to university so who are they to take funds away from other programmes? I should threaten them and say I’ll pay for their fees from the social grants budget. See what they have to say then.

The rest of the people their age are dealing with a real lack of freedom, just like we were. We couldn’t go out at night, were afraid to move freely, or love who we wanted to. It was not a matter of whether to complete a poetry or a philosophy degree; it was a matter of whether to join the cause or live in oppression. Now this group of elites wants us to feel bad for them. Shame.

Besides, these high-flying academic degrees just make students more dramatic, and allow them to imagine they’re more hard done by than they are. These young people don’t know what hardship is. They don’t know what it means to be prevented from being in the very public spaces they’re protesting in. Eventually they’ll burn up their pocket money, and they’ll have to either get a job or go back to class. It can’t last forever.

I need a holiday. Perhaps a permanent one. After all, I’ve done my time. Literally. Is it wrong for a woman my age to want to relax a little, enjoy the fruits of her labour? That’s all I wanted when I built my new home – serenity, a place to think, to have a few pets and take a breath. And now that I have it, it seems as though the people would take it all away from me, their Most Impressive Leader.

It’s too late now. It’s all built, whether they like it or not. I had to rely on Vlad and the others at BRICS. Who knew our communist brothers would still be our closest allies, twenty-odd years after we got the democracy we wanted.

The people should be thanking me, not complaining. It’s not like I got it all and they got nothing. I made a bit of space for Russian investment in the nuclear arena, and now this country will be safer because of the discount they gave me on those special weapons. The only benefit I got was twenty-one magical creatures for my zoo which the public is welcome to visit, via the online virtual tour. They’re missing the bigger picture.

‘Alice!’

‘Yes, Your Excellency?’

‘Where’s the book with all the animals in it?’

‘On your desk, Your Excellency. Just beneath the Constitution.’

I move the tiny book out of the way and pick up my guide, Radulovich’s Compendium of Magical Creatures. The creatures arrive by container tomorrow, and will be ready to be shown to a few hundred special guests this Friday. State-of-the-art cages – local designers, of course. Reading through the book, I’m reminded again of how ungrateful the public is.

It’s a fascinating book. Radulovich discovered so many marvellous animals, it was hard to choose. I stuck to the bold and exciting. Take the Jorgensen wolf, for example. Its call can echo at extreme distances, allowing it to sound like a pack surrounding you from all sides even when it is alone. It gives off a sense that it is a bigger threat than it is, when its call is most often a search for another of its kind. All it wants is a friend who understands, much like myself. We’ve built it a pen with enough space to run around the perimeter, but also space to return to the main zoo so that it can interact with the other creatures. We all need our freedom, but it’s nice to have a place to come home to.

The people should be celebrating what I’ve built. Yet the people complain, the journalists ask aggressive questions about safety, and the parliamentarians make dull enquiries into budgets and fiscal what-whats. It’s all so dry, so regulated.

Their moans and groans don’t matter now anyway. The Department of Security has cleared an area for the zoo, with a special underground bunker for getting the creatures’ food in and out. We made sure that it doubles as an escape route for me, and with the bunker and the additional fencing that it needed, it’s clear that these are vital security upgrades for the property.

If I don’t lock up my beautiful beasts just right, the community could be in danger, and so could I. We can’t have a flying lion on the loose near to the poisonous penguins, now can we? The village would be terrified. And what if that giant tar-eating spider gets out? The roads will be a mess … Well, worse than they are already. The fire pool is a necessary part of the emergency aquatic tank backup system.

I look out my window at the green lawns, white-and-red rose bushes, perfect rows of lavender lining the paths, just a few police officers standing guard in the far distance. I wonder what it might be like to be a wolf, running free, hunting in a pack instead of all alone.

Friday is right around the corner. I should be excited, but it’s fatigue that presses down on my diaphragm. Still, I must soldier on, for my guests. I’m trying to keep the event subtle but classic. I’ve purchased two hundred bottles of Moët, and a bit of caviar from that place I like in Mhlanga. I had hoped the launch of my menagerie would take some of the negativity out of the news. But now these damn students are threatening the peace I’ve tried to create.

I thought I’d inspire people with the flesh-eating caterpillars and the electric python. As for the telepathic cuttlefish, well, I’m not quite sure how they’ve worked out that it is telepathic, but who am I to doubt the Russians? Vlad gave me such a good price on the animals, which are technically rescues since they had to close the zoos. Nobody’s reporting on that part of my philanthropy.

‘Alice?’

‘Your Excellency?’

‘Please can you bring in today’s papers and some more of this tea. It’s so hot in here today, it feels like someone has turned the heater on.’

She sidles in, dropping the papers on my desk, and replacing my empty dewy glass with an ice-cold full one. She’s gone before I get a chance to talk to her about my speech, and what I read in the papers makes me too angry to call her back.

They are all full of images of the protestors; that boy and Sindiwe are on just about every front page. She looks just like her father, I can’t help but notice. Like her father, she’s a problem, and so is that boy. It must be addressed.

I too used to enjoy being the centre of attention, but it’s nice to have a break. Half the time it’s like I am the only story the media cares to cover, and they don’t do it honestly. They must have a thousand photos of me looking confused on file, and others where I’ve blinked and they claim that I’m sleeping. Sometimes I have bad hiccups and the media portrays it as though I am laughing, when it is just a case of a temperamental diaphragm. They are cruel to their dedicated leader, but I decided long ago not to dignify their idiotic articles with a response. Fake news, all of it.

I notice Hlanganyeti, the zookeeper, standing talking to Msizi, my groundsman. I inherited them from the previous president; both were gardeners on the estate. To me they always look like they’re up to something devious, spending too much time talking with each other and too little time doing their separate jobs separately. I must keep an eye on them on Friday. I have enough to worry about without them getting in the way.

Maybe, just maybe, when this zoo launch is done, I can finally take a break from all this. Go somewhere … cooler. I saw how Vlad smiled at me and can’t help but remember how tightly he squeezed my hand when we shook for that trade deal. I picture us together, escaping the heat somewhere up north, sipping on some hot black tea and smiling at each other.

This heat is going to my head.

I put my empty glass down on Sindiwe’s newsprint face, but I don’t feel better. I can’t let these students spoil my special event. They must be stopped, sooner rather than later. I need to hit them where it hurts. Lizards can run without their tails, but not without their heads.

‘Alice! Get me the Minister of Police on the phone. Tell her it’s urgent, and bring me the secure line. I don’t want this recorded.’

‘Yes, Your Excellency.’

Alice walks in with the secure phone on a tray that she holds with both delicate hands. As I reach for it, I’m embarrassed when my dry ageing hands brush her young smooth ones.

‘The minister’s ready on the line when you are, Your Excellency.’

‘Thank you, Alice. Close the door on your way out, will you?’

‘So sorry, Your Excellency, but I forgot to tell you earlier. Maintenance are busy adjusting all of the joints on the doors so they asked us not to close anything too tight, in case we can’t open it again.’

‘Just close it over a little then, thank you.’

‘Yes, Your Excellency. I can always leave my office if you need more privacy?’

I shake my head and she leaves, propping the door open just a little. As I pick up, I look outside my window and see Hlanganyeti and Msizi have gone. That’s one thing off my plate.

Now to sort out this student mess and remind some people who have forgotten that I am in charge. They put themselves at risk if they don’t heed my instructions.