Читать книгу Sister-Sister - Rachel Zadok - Страница 7

One for Me and One for You

I stand at the edge of an overpass as another bleak dawn spills over the city stretched out below. Office blocks rise into the leaden sky like a jawful of giant’s teeth. The wind swoops through, picking a fight with the caged trees lining the pavements, stripping the branches. Leaves dance down the street with plastic bags, paper wrappers and tin cans, a rumble-tumble of discarded things. Only the sunshine sway of a Shoprite packet stops me disappearing into all that grey.

The same wind that steals warmth from flesh and leaves from trees jives the yellow bag down the road. At the corner, it catches a sideways gust and jellyfishes into the air. I watch it float towards heaven, thinking maybe the soul of a plastic bag is a helium balloon, and I pray it makes it all the way up; but before it can reach the second floor of Capital Bank, the wind drops it back down to ride the pavement to and fro, to and fro, pacing-pacing like a strung-out whore.

Traffic lights perform acrobatics for the empty streets. Flick green, flip orange, flick-flack red. And behind me the highway, circling the city like a concrete snake, waits for us.

I turn my back on the slumbering city and wander down the curve of the overpass to the highway, where Sindi spent the night in a wreck at the side of the road. She’s curled like a worm on the passenger side, on the only seat that hasn’t been ripped out to find a new life as somebody’s couch. The lace of one of her boots hangs loose, almost touching the road through a hole in the rusted floor. It must have come undone in the night; she hasn’t taken those Hi-Tecs off since she lifted them from the Salvation Army charity shop when the soles of her sneaks wore through. Her coat she grabbed from the back seat of a careless man’s car. My sisi is a talented thief. I lay my hand against the once plush wool of the coat, now matted as her hair and glittering with frost like Next-Door-Auntie’s eyelids on shebeen night. Her lips are a dead-man shade of blue.

“Blue lips to count blue cars,” I whisper, pressing my finger to her mouth to steal an ice-cream kiss. The kiss is a memory of the time we lifted a Cornetto from Joe Saviour’s fridge and lay on the grassed embankment above the highway, counting cars with stolen sugar on our tongues. Zooming-zooming streaks of red, zooming-zooming streaks of blue. Our greedy eyes gobbled the white stripes. We used to believe that the highway went somewhere, that over the horizon was escape, places we’d never been and thought we wanted to go.

Leaning into the junk through the missing driver-side door, I try to make out the time on the dashboard clock. The dash is retro, the clock analogue: just two hands and four lines at twelve, three, six and nine. It doesn’t work, but I want to know when it stopped. I like to know that things stop, because sometimes it feels that we never will.

For Sindi, walking is better than standing still. When you walk, things change. Mama Moon slides from skinny sliver to bloated belly; as her baby grows, we circle the city. In summer, if it rains, sunflowers seed in cracks and sprout and bloom, and each time we pass, they’ve changed. The stems thicken, the petals brighten and the seed cluster grows blacker than a nest of hungry beaks. Then comes the day when nothing grows there any more, when all that’s left of that yellow sun is a dried, brown husk.

Leaving Sindi to sleep, I drift over to the buckled crash-barrier and sit down. I sink into the dent, run my fingers over the rusted scars. If I wanted, I could sense what twisted the metal. Ghosts clamour in my ears. They want to tell me their stories, but I don’t like to listen. Everybody’s got a story. I have a story of my own.

Across the highway, the salmon-pink boundary wall of a townhouse complex jars against the barren embankment like a bright mirage projected onto the dawn. It hurts more than my eyes, so I turn to the safety of the grey road and block the complex out completely by shutting an eye.

One-eyed, I watch sunlight spike over the horizon, but before the orb appears the drone of an engine breaks the stillness and a b-diesel junk rolls into view. The driver hunches over the steering wheel, peering through a hole wiped clean in the condensed breath clouding the glass.

I don’t notice the man standing on the shoulder of the highway until he bolts into the road and plants his feet into the concrete. I suck my teeth as the junk swerves to avoid him, but he just roars and raises a panga into the air.

Joe used to say that crazies have always walked this highway. Sometimes, while we sat on the grass counting cars, one of them would wander up to Saviour’s Pit Stop. The first time we saw a crazy, we’d just turned eight. Sindi was ahead, eleven blue to four red, when a gogo came walking up the road. She wore a floral-print summer dress and shaded her head with a tattered umbrella, silver spokes glinting. She had only one shoe. Her face was hidden behind a net of tangled grey hair, but when she got close, she swept it aside and gave us a smile and we saw she had a mouth full of white teeth and skin like a baby, smooth-smooth. Curious that someone could be young and old both, we followed her to the Pit Stop and hid behind the pumps. Joe bought a family-sized bucket from Chicken Licken next door and, while she told him her story, they shared out the drumsticks and wings: one for me, one for you. Her story was probably sad, because Joe cried. Joe had cried for so many people, his tears had carved ravines in his cheeks. When there were only bones left in the bottom of the bucket, Joe led her to the men’s room to freshen up, even though she was a lady. We waited for her to come out, until boredom made us brave enough to knock. Knock-knock. She never replied, who’s there? After her, there were others, some scary, some nice like that first gogo, but none ever came out when we knocked.

Joe made lots of money from selling illegal b-diesel and renting out zozo houses, but he wasn’t like the other fat cats. I only ever saw him in ragged denim cut-offs and freebie T-shirts, XXXL, with company logos splashed across the front. Mama said he must have wanted to be a head doctor because he never did anything but listen to people’s problems. Ben did all the real work at Saviour’s: man’s work, he called it. Sindi thought that was funny because Ben was soft, like a baby angel. He had round cheeks and full lips and always wore a black beret tilted at an angle, like the auntie that hawked paintings of shacks for big bucks on the side of the road. Ben said the crazies were harmless, just lost souls looking for the way home. “They are not going to hurt you, little sisters,” he told us. “Trust me, I know things.”

Ben knew things because he was from Nigeria, which is high up in Africa and therefore closer to heaven. “I’ve got God’s ear, little sisters,” he liked to say, tugging on an earlobe.

I wonder what he’d think of this junk-chasing crazy. He’s naked except for bits of rag he’s tied around his waist like a skirt. A black cape flaps out behind him as he runs down the highway, slicing the panga from side to side like he’s trying to cut the sky into pieces. This one thinks he’s a superhero.

The junk passes us by, backfiring greasy b-diesel farts that smell of fried chicken and remind me again of Joe. The crazy comes barrelling after, eyeballs popping like boiled eggs. Up close I see his superhero cape is an animal pelt. From the brown paws knotted at his throat, I figure it once belonged to a Rottweiler. And the rags aren’t rags but a collection of dead things hanging from a belt. I spy the skin of a cat and a pair of severed pigeon wings.

The boom of backfire wakes Sindi. She bolts upright and hits her head on the bent windscreen frame. For one heart-stopping moment I imagine her skin hanging from the crazy’s belt, but she crouches down as he passes, clutching her head. He doesn’t even glance her way.

We sit against the salmon-pink boundary wall of the townhouse complex, watching the crazy chase a green electric up the highway. Electrics are slower than junks so maybe he’ll catch it.

The electric fades into the distance and he stands on a white line, back straight, panga down, watching. His breath forms miniature cumulus clouds in the cold air. I wonder what sort of legend God has sealed into him that makes him chase cars he can’t catch and skin creatures he can.

Joe Saviour once told me that every life has a legend. Before the soul comes down to earth, God seals a story inside it. To know your purpose, you need to unravel the mystery of that legend. He says it’s a sad thing that most people only think about that mystery once they’ve walked to the end of the road.

Our story began on the dawn of a fresh new era. That’s what the headline of the newspaper article said, the one Mama kept folded into the cover of her ID book: The Dawn of a Fresh New Era. It was D-Day, the last day of the petrol-car amnesty, when everyone was meant to change to electric. We only learned that in history class when we were ten, though. Until then, I thought we were the dawn they meant, and I told anyone who teased us that we were so special our birth made headlines.

I’ve always had a big mouth. Mama said I came into the world squawking like one of Gogo Nkosi’s hens with a stuck egg. I made such a fuss, no one noticed Mama’s labour pains hadn’t stopped; thirteen minutes later, when my sisi followed, the nurse had to lunge across the room to catch her.

Two wrinkled doll-size gogos, exactly the same right down to our toes – but my sisi entered the room without a sound. Quieter than a mouse: she didn’t even squeak.

For long, Sindi spoke to no one but me. Then we went to school and the teacher forced her. Even so, it was only me she spoke to straight. To anyone else, she had to spit out words like gum chewed so long it stuck to her teeth.

Mama named us the wrong way around, what with me being a bigmouth and Sindisiwe a stutterer. Maybe, like most people, she had a hard time telling us apart, even though we were tagged Nxumalo baby 1 and Nxumalo baby 2. I know because, along with the headline, she kept our plastic hospital bracelets.

But that, like the petrol car, is history.

I step away from the wall like a piece of its shadow. Winter has seeped into Sindi’s lungs. She sits, catching her breath in the sun, while I drift off to suss out the townhouse complex.

The complex is like lots of places on the south side of the city. Loops of barbed wire gleam down at me from the top of the eight-foot stop-nonsense, but there are no guards or cameras. Security with more bark than bite. All a thief needs is a foot up and a blanket.

I stand at the gate and stare through the bars at the houses beyond. An intercom, ten buttons equals ten houses, controls who gets in. The houses are all the same, five on the left mirrored by five on the right with a brick-paved road between them. I wonder if the people that live there were ever like me; if I might’ve turned out like them, given a half-chance. Maybe I would’ve married, walked down the aisle with a boy who knew the proper names of clouds, like Dumisile. Sindi might have married his brother. We would live in a place like this, locked up safe behind a gate. Maybe here, with a view of the highway. We’d be next-door neighbours in twin houses. And the cars parked in our garages would be proper electrics, not b-diesel junks. One red, one blue.

When I return, Sindi is staring at the rush-hour traffic. A piece of glass, probably from the windscreen of the wreck she slept in, is lodged in her hair. As I reach out to remove it, she turns her head. The glass catches the sun. I’m struck by how alive it looks, compared to her eyes. My fingers hover, ready to pluck it out; then I change my mind and leave it there.

Sitting side by side, we watch the traffic. Sometimes I forget why we walk this road, and I tell myself it’s because we’re looking for the beginning. Not of the concrete highway – it’s not called the Ring Road for nothing – but for the beginning of the rush hour. Each day, we’re at a different place when the cars slow down and sit, bumper-to-bumper, inching-inching. But I’ve never seen it, that first vehicle that blocks the lane and becomes the head of a multicoloured car snake, five lanes wide, unwinding along the highway forever.

Each day I look, believing my small legend, until I see a driver, impatient, stupid, raging, thrust into the oncoming traffic. Believe until I hear the metal scream as the cars twist into each other like wrestlers on WWE in a lock-up. Round and round they go, caught in a spinning vortex for an eternity of seconds and THUD, they sideswipe a barrier and THUMP, tyres squeal and burn black into the road and THWUMP, a nose smashes against the steering wheel, a skull smacks the windscreen, glass shatters, bone splinters. It’s almost music, a melody of broken glass over a bass beat of bumper cars. Thud, thump, thwump. A wind-up traffic-accident circus song.

And after, in the short, shocked vacuum of silence, you can almost hear the hiss of the soul leaving the body.

Then I see the light inside Sindi switch. Her eyes glitter like the glass in her hair and she whispers, “Emi, oru, abiku, O,” and I know, finding beginnings is not why we are here.

Thirteen cars leave the gate, among them three red and two blue. Game Thuli. I peer over Sindi’s shoulder as she examines the intercom board with its shiny silver buttons all in a row. Next to each button, a strip of Perspex holds the occupant’s name: Williams, Gxekwa, Sihoyiya, Abrams, Thwala, Walker, Makofane, Simons, Wynn, Sousa. I try to decide which to press, a random calculation based on nothing but gut. My gut says go with A: it’s easy to say.

“Abrams,” I whisper. Sindi pretends not to hear me and presses her palm against the board, sounding all the bells.

She waits three seconds before thumbing the buttons again, one-one, one-one, one-one.

The speaker fizzes and cracks and spits: “Hello.”

Sindi steps back, as if she’d not expected anyone to be home. I nudge her with my elbow. She clears her throat. “Delivery,” she croaks.

“Leave it in the box,” comes the sigh-reply.

“It’s too big.”

“The madam said nothing about a delivery. Who for?” I smile.

“Mrs Abrams,” I murmur in Sindi’s ear.

“Uhm_m_M,” Sindi peers at the board, “Abrams.”

“Abrams? She’s in number three, buzz her.”

“She’s nnn_not home.” But by the time her words are out, the domestic’s gone. Sindi kicks the ground with the toe of her boot, but still we hang about in the vain hope she’ll buzz us in. After a minute, Sindi walks away. I follow, disappointed I won’t get to see, close-up, the life we could’ve had. We haven’t gone five steps when the motor clicks.

We’re through the gate before it’s wide, ducking into the shadows. Hidden behind a bush, we watch a car reverse clear of a driveway. The driver slicks lipstick over her mouth, checking her reflection in the rear-view mirror, before heading out into the world. Auntie, I think, didn’t anyone ever tell you not to open the gate until you were right there? Unlucky for you, lucky for us.

Sticking to the shadows, we slip behind the houses on the left. A wide service path runs between the eight-foot boundary and another wall painted the same fishy pink; it’s not as high, but we still can’t see over. Wheelie bins stand sentry next to five metal doors, one for each house. We pass door number one: too easy to see from the gate.

At door number two, Sindi cocks her head. A TV blares a tune I know. It takes a second before I get it and flash back to lying on Next-Door-Auntie’s brown couch watching soapies until my eyes burned and my head throbbed. Next-Door-Auntie loved soapies, Isidingo-Generations-Backstage-Scandal-7de Laan-The Bold, she didn’t have time for new-fangled nonsense. She’d started watching with her Ma when she was two bricks high and the starrings in those shows were like family to her. She knew their ins and outs going back decades; who was who, even though the casts weren’t always the same as when she was a girl. Except for The Bold. Those starrings never changed. She said Ridge still looked the same as when she was four. Behind her back we called him Rigid.

There’s an empty silence that says nobody home at number three. Sindi tugs the handle. Locked. At four, my nose fills with Surf Superblue scents. On the other side of the door, Kabelo’s “Can’t Kill Me Now” is playing on the radio. Someone sings along, out of tune and a beat behind. The song reminds me of the radio Mama once bought with her Christmas bonus.

“Don’t touch,” she said when she lifted it from the box. It stood on the kitchen table, shiny plastic casing unmarked by our greasy fingers until, one day at school, Dumisile told us there was going to be a three-hour “Legends of Kwaito” retrospective. That afternoon, me and Sindi jaiva’d jigga jigga around the kitchen table.

You should have killed me,

You should have killed me, cos

You can’t kill me now.

“One day,” I told Sindi, “I’m going to win Idols. I’m going to be a starring.”

“Woo, Sisi!” she said, “Woo woo!”

Mama came home, tired and beat, and found the battery doornail-dead and no soapie to go with her tea. We ran to Saviour’s Pit Stop to beg a new one from Joe so we could restore her happiness, but he said Mama had lost her happiness long before that battery died. I don’t think he understood what that radio meant to Mama. It was a sign she might one day get out of there, and its death, no matter how temporary, reminded her that she never would. There was always a radio playing at Saviour’s. Joe used to tune in to the golden oldies and croon out songs like a dog at full moon – until the Black Preacher began to fill the airways with his new religion. Joe loved those sermons. He’d sit in his chair and listen, chuckling to himself. Sometimes, the things the Black Preacher said made him laugh so hard, he’d fart.

One more door, then we have to cross the little road to get to the houses on the other side. I suck my bottom lip. Forever passes before the singer next door finishes hanging out the washing and her song fades into the house. Sindi eases the handle, leans into the door. The metal groans, shifts. I hold my breath. She pushes harder. The door gives. Holding it just wide enough for her eyes, Sindi peers in. My heart beats fast enough to blow, but I resist the urge to bump her up so I can see. There’s a smell, thick and moist on my tongue.

Sindi slips through the gap, leaving me alone with the wheelie bin. I wait a moment, in case she comes back; then, against my worming guts, I step through the door.

We’re standing in a small yard. The wall’s depressing pinkness is broken only by a kitchen door and window. A gutter runs down one wall and spits a hunk of slime into a choked drain. On the inside sill, an avocado pip moulders in the neck of a jam jar among a clutter of coffee cups, dishwashing liquid and empty bottles. A dead moth, belly-up in a dirty glass, makes me scrunch my nose. I look away. If this were my house, I’d keep it nice.

Squeaking to mark each grinding rotation, a wash line turns in the breeze. Sindi slinks over and frees a raggedy T-shirt from its pegs. She holds it up against her. FIFA World Cup is printed in large letters across the front.

I sniff. Dog kaka litters the yard. I play a mental game of join-the-dots, my eyes leaping from turd to turd until I sight two plastic bowls, too yellow and happy for the place. One is half-filled with water, filmy with dust, the other with dry pellets. I glance at the door. There is a small flap at the bottom, not big enough for a pit bull or a Rottweiler – but mini-mutts are yappers, alarm dogs worse than police sirens for bringing the domestic out to see what’s up.

I turn to Sindi. She’s spotted the bowls and is moving towards them. At the window, she stops and looks in. The glass is a still pond broken only by her reflection, a ghost girl watching. She sinks to her knees and lifts a bowl to her lips. Water spills from the corners of her mouth and slides off the matted wool of her coat. She drinks half the water, then takes a fistful of pellets. They crunch like chicken bones in her teeth.

We used to share. Everything was one for me, one for you. On payday, Mama would bring home a quart of Black Label for her and Next-Door-Auntie and a packet of slap chips for us. We’d rip the greasy bag and savour the vinegar-soft, salty chips, one for me, one for you. Even the last lick of the bag we split, half-half. While all the other kids rolled oranges along the ground until the insides were a squash of juice and pulp they could suck through a hole, me and Sindi peeled the skin, stripped the spongy pith and divided the segments, one for me, one for you.

We stole sweets from Joe’s shop. I leaned on the counter asking him stupid questions while Sindi stole up and down the aisles, sticking rolls of Triple-X and Lifesavers into her pockets. One time, she pushed a whole packet of Sparkles up her sleeve. She looked like she’d grown a goitre like the one on Gogo Nkosi’s neck.

Sitting on our bed we divided our sweets, one for me, one for you. We split them by colour: orange, purple, green, yellow, red; any that didn’t come out in twos we’d collect in a Consol jar. We didn’t stick anything in our mouths that didn’t have a twin, wasn’t a one for me, one for you.

Remembering happy days brings me low. I drift over to the steps by the door and sit down. I stare at my baby-dolls, at the dust-clogged pattern of teardrops cut into the toes, and listen to Sindi’s stomach growl. The sound hollows me out.

“Sisi’s eating Epol, one for me and one for you.”

She looks up, stops chewing.

“Sorry, Sisi,” I whisper, ashamed of my song. “I was just teasing.”

But it’s not me she’s looking at. The skin at the base of my skull pricks, sending a spike of cold down my spine. Slow, I turn my head. The flap on the dog-door points at us like an accusing finger, and the shaggy head of a white Maltese poodle pokes through.

I wave my hands. “Shoo,” I say, “Shoo!”

Sindi hisses, spitting bits of stolen pellets. The Maltese bares its teeth. Eyes fixed on the dog, Sindi digs into the bowl, takes a handful of pellets and drops them into her pocket. The dog growls. She narrows her eyes, reaches into the bowl again.

“Sisi,” I warn, but it’s too late. The dog rockets forward. Sindi throws up her hands up to defend her face and the dog sinks needle teeth into the soft flesh of her palm. Her arms flap, but the dog is all over her and she loses her balance. Pellets scatter across the yard as the bowl is sent into a spin. The water bowl flips, but neither Sindi nor the dog notice. The dog snarls and bites. Sindi kicks and yells.

I run around waving my hands, but it does nothing to help. Their coats blur black and white and I’m thinking this is the end, the dog will rip her throat, when Sindi’s foot connects. The dog yelps. A strange liquid sound that makes everything stop.

The dog takes a few wobbling steps, whimpers and sits down; but just when I think that dog is going to fall over dead, it jumps up again and shoots through the pet flap into the house, tail between its legs.

I want to get out of there, but Sindi doesn’t seem in any rush. She dusts dog shit from her coat, carefully wiping the wool with the stolen T-shirt, then bends to gather the scattered pellets. Blood runs down the inside of her hand and drips off her fingertips, freckling the concrete. I scan the yard for somewhere to wash the wound, but there are no taps, and all that is left of the water from the dog’s bowl is a damp patch on the concrete.